BHASHINI and NITI Aayog Sign Statement of Intent on Multilingual AI
Why in the news
The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) and NITI Aayog signed a Statement of Intent on 12 August 2026 in New Delhi to bring multilingual, voice-first artificial intelligence into public governance.
Key facts
- Initiative: BHASHINI for Seva/Sanchalan.
- Signed by Amitabh Nag (CEO, DIBD) and Shoyabahmed Kalal (Director, NITI Aayog).
- Aim: lower language barriers on government platforms and let citizens use services in their preferred Indian languages.
- Plans include integrating translation APIs into NITI Aayog services and building sector-specific terminology tools.
- Five tools are involved: BHASHINI Udyat, Mitra, AppMitra, Sahayogi and Pravakta; Sahayogi uses the BhashaDaan crowdsourcing effort for datasets.
About BHASHINI
BHASHINI is India’s national language technology mission, run under the Digital India Corporation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). It provides machine translation, speech-to-text and text-to-speech through APIs and digital tools for Indian languages. NITI Aayog is the government’s policy think tank.
Exam angle
- BHASHINI comes under MeitY and the Digital India programme.
- Remember the initiative name and the two signatories’ organisations.
- BhashaDaan is the crowdsourcing component for language data.