Digital India BHASHINI Division, NITI Aayog sign AI pact

The Digital India BHASHINI Division and NITI Aayog signed a Statement of Intent in New Delhi on 12 August 2026 to advance multilingual, voice-first artificial intelligence for public governance. The Digital India BHASHINI Division functions under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and the partnership uses BHASHINI language translation application programming interfaces and reference applications across NITI Aayog’s digital platforms and communication workflows.

BHASHINI and Digital Language Infrastructure

BHASHINI is India’s national language technology mission for machine translation, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and related language services. The platform supports Indian languages through application programming interfaces, reference applications, and digital tools for public service delivery.

Statement of Intent and Institutional Roles

The Statement of Intent was signed by Shri Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, and Shri Shoyabahmed Kalal, Director of NITI Aayog. NITI Aayog is the Government of India’s policy think tank, and it works on planning, innovation, and governance-related digital initiatives.

Flagship Sub-programmes under the Partnership

The collaboration includes five flagship sub-programmes named BHASHINI Udyat, BHASHINI Mitra, BHASHINI AppMitra, BHASHINI Sahayogi, and BHASHINI Pravakta. These sub-programmes are designed for multilingual governance support, sector-specific applications, and wider use of voice-based digital tools.

Important Facts for Exams

• BHASHINI stands for the National Language Translation Mission and operates under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• BhashaDaan is a crowdsourcing platform used to collect text, audio, and video for language datasets.
• Voice-first AI systems use spoken input and output as the primary mode of interaction.
• NITI Aayog was established in 2015 as the successor to the Planning Commission.

Governance Use and Grassroots Adoption

BHASHINI Sahayogi uses BhashaDaan to encourage officials and citizens to contribute multilingual data for dataset creation. BHASHINI Pravakta includes training, technical assistance, and resources across districts for local adoption of AI-based language tools.