A village meeting being recorded on a mobile phone, a bus conductor speaking into an app to log a complaint, a citizen calling a helpline and explaining a problem in their own language. These are everyday moments across India, a nation of 1.4 billion people. Yet until recently, most digital systems struggled to understand them. The challenge was not access to technology, but whether technology could understand how India speaks.
India’s digital expansion has been vast. Government services, financial platforms, welfare delivery systems, and grievance mechanisms have moved online at scale. But as these platforms grew, a gap became visible. Many systems functioned in a limited set of languages, while most users continued to think, speak, and interact in their own languages. For millions, digital engagement stopped at the language barrier.
This gap reshaped how inclusion was understood. Digital access could no longer mean connectivity alone. It had to mean comprehension, ease, and familiarity. That shift led to the launch of Digital India BHASHINI in July 2022, under the broader National Language Translation Mission. The initiative marked a decisive change by recognising language as a foundational layer of digital public infrastructure, not an optional feature.
Housed within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the Digital India Corporation, BHASHINI enables digital interaction across Indian languages and English using multilingual AI. Its core idea is simple: people should not have to change how they speak to use technology; technology should understand how people speak.
In a linguistically diverse country, uniform digital behaviour cannot be assumed. For many, speaking is more natural than typing, especially on mobile devices. Voice-based systems reduce hesitation, lower effort, and build confidence. By combining speech recognition, translation, and language understanding, BHASHINI enables interactions that feel intuitive rather than instructional, democratizing access to AI beyond the English-speaking population.
The platform handles the complexity of real-world language use. Indian speech varies by region, accent, and context. Text-heavy interfaces can exclude users. BHASHINI enables systems to listen, interpret, and respond across languages, addressing multiple barriers together rather than in isolation.
From a technology perspective, BHASHINI has evolved into a national-scale multilingual AI ecosystem. It supports speech recognition in twenty-two constitutional languages and text translation across thirty-six languages. Capabilities include text-to-speech, speech-to-speech translation, optical character recognition, transliteration, and India-specific digital lexicons, designed for real deployment across governance, enterprise, and citizen-facing platforms.
The scale of adoption reflects the demand for language-aware systems. BHASHINI hosts more than 350 AI models and datasets and has processed over four billion language interactions, with millions of daily users. Supported by the National Language Technology Centre, it enables integration across government platforms, startups, and enterprises.
A defining strength of BHASHINI is its focus on Indian language data. Built with research institutions, startups, and state governments, datasets reflect how languages are actually spoken and written. Every deployment feeds back into the system, improving accuracy and performance. This ensures the technology evolves with the lived linguistic realities of India’s 1.4 billion citizens.
BHASHINI’s growth follows principles that enable scale without rigidity. Deployments begin with narrow, high-impact use cases and expand through rapid learning. Open and interoperable APIs allow platforms to integrate quickly, while standardised datasets lower entry barriers for innovators. Co-creation with governments, enterprises, and communities ensures solutions are shaped by those who use them.
The impact is visible at the grassroots. Panchayati Raj Institutions use voice-enabled tools to record meetings and generate multilingual documentation. Across welfare services, transport, employment, and grievance platforms, multilingual and voice-first interfaces improve access, response times, and transparency.
Language-aware systems enhance productivity and efficiency. Spoken inputs automatically convert into transcripts, summaries, or structured data, reducing manual work and accelerating decision-making. These gains benefit institutions managing information at scale and citizens engaging with digital systems for the first time.
India’s broader direction in artificial intelligence will take centre stage at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled from 16 to 20 February in New Delhi, where BHASHINI will feature as a key pillar of India’s inclusive AI ecosystem. The summit will highlight how language-aware AI can strengthen governance, expand economic participation, and build trust in digital systems.
For decades, India’s linguistic diversity was seen as a complication for technology. BHASHINI reflects a different understanding. By treating language as infrastructure and embedding learning into every interaction, India is turning diversity into a digital advantage. When digital systems learn to listen in the languages 1.4 billion people live by, inclusion stops being an ambition and becomes routine.
(The author is Chief Executive Officer, Digital India BHASHINI Division; Views expressed are personal)
