The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Digital India BHASHINI Division held a workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya to explore how artificial intelligence can make government services more accessible in Indian languages. The session brought together state officials and language experts to discuss bringing digital governance closer to citizens through Marathi and other regional languages.
What was discussed and demonstrated
The Digital India BHASHINI Division showcased its language technology capabilities through live demonstrations of several features: speech recognition, conversion of speech to text, text converted back to speech, translation between languages, and voice-based interaction with digital systems.
The workshop emphasised how government systems need to understand and respond in the languages people actually speak daily. Participants explored how artificial intelligence could be customised for different government departments, allowing systems to handle specialised terminology and government-specific content more accurately.
A significant part of the discussion focused on BhashaDaan, a crowdsourcing platform where citizens can contribute language data to improve AI systems. The workshop highlighted that building effective language technology requires high-quality data from language experts, government bodies, academic institutions and communities.
Maharashtra-specific plans were also discussed, including a concept referred to as MahaBHASHINI, which would create a multilingual AI ecosystem tailored for the state. This could be applied to services in tourism, transport and other sectors that directly serve the public.
Current reach of the BHASHINI platform
The Digital India BHASHINI Division currently supports 36 Indian languages in text form and 23 Indian languages in voice form. It also handles 35 international languages. The platform powers over 800 government websites and has processed more than 9 billion artificial intelligence operations cumulatively, handling approximately 24 million AI operations daily.
What this means for you
If you access government services or information online, these developments could eventually mean clearer communication in your preferred language rather than English or Hindi alone. Government websites and services may become easier to navigate using voice commands in regional languages. Citizens interested in language preservation can also contribute language samples through the BhashaDaan platform to improve how AI understands Indian languages.