Bhashini is an

Indian government The Government of India (ISO: Bhārata Sarakāra, legally the Union Government or Union of India or the Central Government) is the national authority of the Republic of India, located in South Asia, consisting of 36 states and union territor ...

project developed by

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITy) is an executive agency of the Government of India, Union Government of the India, Republic of India. It was carved out of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (I ...

under its "National Language Translation Mission." It aims to help Indian citizens translate content in various Indian languages and enable effective communication among different-language speakers across India, and thus reduce the

language barrier A language barrier is a figurative phrase used primarily to refer to linguistic barriers to communication, i.e. the difficulties in communication experienced by people or groups originally speaking different languages (or different dialects in ...

in India.

Background

Bhashini was launched at

Gandhinagar Gandhinagar () is the capital of the state of Gujarat in India. Gandhinagar is located approximately 23 km north of Ahmedabad, on the west central point of the industrial corridor between the megacities of Delhi and Mumbai. Gandhinagar ...

Gujarat Gujarat () is a States of India, state along the Western India, western coast of India. Its coastline of about is the longest in the country, most of which lies on the Kathiawar peninsula. Gujarat is the List of states and union territories ...

in August 2022. The name "Bhashini" is an abbreviation for "Bhasha Interface for India." It is developed under the National Language Translation Mission by

. An Independent Business Division (IBD) called Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) has been started under

Digital India Corporation Digital India Corporation (DIC) is an Indian not-for-profit company established by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, under Section 8 of Companies Act 2013. The organization is currently respons ...

(DIC) to help Bhashini ecosystem collab with startups.

Platform

The platform uses

Natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

and AI, to go beyond language barriers, ensuring digital empowerment and digital inclusion across different states. It has more than 300 pre-trained AI models available to Bhashini ecosystem partners exposed via Open Bhashini

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

Adoption

In December 2023, PM

Narendra Modi Narendra Damodardas Modi (born 17 September 1950) is an Indian politician who has served as the Prime Minister of India, prime minister of India since 2014. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Par ...

, used Bhashini to translate his realtime speech into for his Tamil audience. Later,

Finance Minister A ministry of finance is a ministry or other government agency in charge of government finance, fiscal policy, and financial regulation. It is headed by a finance minister, an executive or cabinet position . A ministry of finance's portfoli ...

Nirmala Sitharaman Nirmala Sitharaman (born 18 August 1959) is an Indian economist, politician and a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) serving as the Minister of Finance and Minister of Corporate Affairs of the Government of India since 2019. ...

used the platform during her 2024

Union budget of India The Union Budget of India, also known as the Annual Financial Statement under Article 112 of the Constitution of India, Indian Constitution, is the country's annual financial plan prepared by the Ministry of Finance (India), Ministry of Financ ...

speech. In June 2024, MeitY sought bidders to allow research projects for better accuracy and fluency of machine translation. It promoted use of specific language pairs and use of such domain-specific language models for government, education, healthcare, and other critical sectors. Bhashini signed MoUs with

Snapdeal Snapdeal is an Indian e-commerce company, based in New Delhi, India. It was founded in February 2010 by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. Snapdeal is one of the top 5 online marketplaces in India. Snapdeal targets the value e-commerce segment, w ...

, Ministry of I&B,

Federal Bank Federal Bank Limited is an Indian private sector bank headquartered in Aluva, Kerala. The bank has 1588+ banking outlets and, 2079+ ATMs/ CDMS spread across different states in India and overseas representative offices at Abu Dhabi and Dubai. ...

among others providing its AI models to cater solutions in vernacular languages. In September 2024,

Open Network for Digital Commerce Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is a public technology initiative launched by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Government of India to foster decentralized open e-commerce model and is led by a privat ...

(ONDC) launched Saarthi, an application that enables businesses to create their own personalised buyer-side applications using Bhashini. Rajasthan government developed Pehchan app, a digital platform that makes birth and death registration easier by enabling voice commands in different languages using Bhashini AI.

References

External links

* {{Official Website Government programmes of India 2022 establishments in India