• Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitched for sharing India’s indigenously developed AI-based language platform — Bhashini — with SCO member countries to remove language barriers within the international grouping.

• This can serve as an example of digital technology for inclusive growth, he said during his address at a virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

• Currently, the SCO’s official languages are Mandarin and Russian.    

• India has been pitching for also including English as the official language of the grouping. 

What is Bhashini?

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the National Language Technology Mission known as ‘Digital India Bhashini’ on July 4, 2022. 

• This will overcome the humongous challenge of breaking the language barrier using data-driven AI technologies.

• The Bhashini platform will catalyse the entire digital ecosystem and is a giant step towards realising the goal of digital government.

Goals of Bhashini:

• To enable all Indians an easy access to the Internet and digital services in their own language and increase the content in Indian languages. 

• To build a National Public Digital Platform for languages to develop services and products for citizens by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

• To empower Indian citizens by connecting them to the digital initiatives of the country in their own language, thereby leading to digital inclusion.

• To increase the content in Indian languages on the Internet substantially in the domains of public interest, particularly, governance and policy, science & technology, etc, thus encouraging citizens to use the Internet in their own language.

Salient features of Bhashini

• It shall act as an orchestrator to unify and align a large diverse network across government, industry, academia, research groups and startups to bring all their contributions into an open repository.

• Bhashini will involve the development of a national digital public platform for language to provide universal access to content, that is to boost the delivery of digital content in all Indian languages. This would result in the creation of a knowledge-based society where information is freely and readily available.

• Citizens shall be provided easy tools and motivated to contribute towards the languages of their liking through Bhashini’s crowd-sourcing platform.

• Startups will also be encouraged to create innovative applications by using Bhashini’s resources.

Bhasha Daan

• Bhasha Daan is an initiative to crowdsource language inputs for multiple Indian languages as part of Project Bhashini. 

• It calls upon citizens to help build an open repository of data to digitally enrich his/her own language. 

• The aim here is to create large datasets for Indian languages, which can be used to train AI models for use by different stakeholders to create products or services for the betterment of society. One can contribute to the project anonymously. 

• The bigger aim is to create an open-source repository that anyone can access.

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