• The Mizoram government and Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote multilingual governance and empower the Mizo community through language technology in their native tongue.

• With this strategic partnership, Mizoram is set to adopt Bhashini’s platform, reaffirming its commitment to preserving the state’s linguistic heritage while ensuring digital access and participation for all citizens.

• This MoU marks a major milestone in Mizoram’s efforts to promote native language access in governance, preserve regional languages, and empower tribal communities through digital inclusion.

The partnership aims to achieve:

i) Enhanced Citizen Services: By enabling access to government schemes, services, and information in Mizo and other local languages.

ii) Inclusive Governance: By breaking language barriers in public administration, the initiative promotes transparency, trust, and participation from all sections of society.

iii) Digital Empowerment: The partnership ensures that no citizen is left behind due to language limitations, making technology and governance truly accessible and inclusive.

iv) Improve Mizo Language AI Models: Collaborate on enhancing Mizo language datasets and AI models to create accurate, culturally relevant translation tools for India's multilingual ecosystem.

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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