• The Meghalaya government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Digital India Bhashini Division, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), for the integration of the state’s Garo and Khasi languages into the platform.

• Bhashini is an AI powered language translation platform, bridging literacy, language, and digital divides.

• The inclusion of the Garo and Khasi languages enables Meghalaya to join a select group of states making their indigenous languages digitally accessible across the nation.

• Meghalaya has been demanding that Khasi and Garo be included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. 

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.

• Bhashini (BHASHa INterface for India) is a pathbreaking initiative aimed at democratising access to digital content and services across India’s linguistic spectrum. 

• By addressing linguistic diversity, it promotes digital inclusion, enabling citizens to access education, healthcare, governance, and other essential services in their preferred language.

• It aligns with the objectives of the Digital India program by fostering inclusivity and accessibility. 

• Bhashini uses cutting-edge AI and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to bridge the language divide, enabling users to access content and services in their preferred language. 

• It is implemented by Digital India Bhashini Division, a division under Digital India Corporation, a Section 8 company of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

• Bhashini currently supports more than 22 languages, enabling inclusivity for a broad range of linguistic communities.

Objectives of Bhashini:

i) Long-term strategy for developing sustainable Indian language technology, solutions and ecosystem technology.

ii) Adoption of Indian language technology, solutions for easier access to the Internet.

iii) Growth of Indian language content and technology over the Internet.

iv) Harness economies of scale in Indian language technologies, solutions, applications data sets and AI models.

v) Promote and facilitate indigenous intellectual property (IP) generation.

vi) Encourage, enable and incentivise the Transfer of Technologies (ToT).

vii) Enable collaborations and partnership programmes with national and international agencies.

viii) Catalysing collaborative research, commercialisation awareness, and capacity building.

Salient features of Bhashini:

i) 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.

ii) 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.

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

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

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