The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology highlighted India’s efforts to make artificial intelligence accessible across its linguistic diversity. Shri Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, spoke at Lattice 2026, the annual business conclave of IIM Calcutta, held in Kolkata under the theme “The Capability Decade”.
What Digital India BHASHINI Does
Digital India BHASHINI Division, operating under the Digital India Corporation within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is India’s national platform for using artificial intelligence to expand digital access across language groups. The platform currently powers over 800 government websites and has processed more than 9 billion cumulative artificial intelligence inferences. Daily, it handles over 24 million inferences. The platform supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages and 35 international languages.
During his address, Shri Nag spoke about the real-world obstacles faced in deploying language technology at scale. He identified the digital, language and literacy divides as interconnected problems requiring technology that responds to local contexts. He emphasised that voice-first and multilingual approaches are necessary given India’s diversity in language, dialect, domain and context. A live demonstration of BHASHINI’s Shrutlekh tool showed real-time language translation and transcription during the session itself.
Shri Nag stressed that organisational design, market design, incentive structure and ecosystem design often posed greater challenges than technical model development. He highlighted the importance of involving communities in creating language resources through initiatives like BhashaDaan, rapid experimentation, learning from failures and maintaining short feedback loops between research teams and real-world requirements.
What This Means for You
Citizens who use government services in Indian languages will find these services increasingly accessible through voice and text. Students and technology professionals can contribute to language resource creation. Organisations building with emerging technologies now have a reference model for designing ecosystems that serve India’s linguistic diversity rather than treating it as an obstacle. The approach signals that technology adoption in India will increasingly prioritise local language access and cultural context rather than requiring users to adapt to English-dominant systems.