New Delhi: The Centre on Tuesday said its Artificial Intelligence based initiative Digital BHASHINI would ensure that citizens consume the internet and digital government services in their own languages, according to an official release. BHASHINI stands for BHASHa INterface for India, a part of the Digital India Mission of the Ministry of Electronics and IT. The project aims to empower citizens by connecting them to the digital initiatives in their own language, leading to digital inclusion.
“The Bhashini platform is interoperable and will catalyse the entire digital ecosystem. It is a giant step to realize the goal of digital government. The platform will make Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources available to the MSMEs, start-ups and individual innovators in the public domain,” said Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar. “We see the role of start-ups in innovation, development as well as consumption of technology,” he added.
The minister addressed around 73 start-ups working in the field of Artificial Intelligence and language technology under the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) virtually. “BharatNet and 5G will catalyse the goal to connect all Indians to the Internet,” said Chandrasekhar.
Also read: Quad moving ahead with a constructive agenda for Indo-Pacific: PM Modi
The Mission Digital India Bhashini also aims to increase the content in Indian languages on the Internet substantially in the domains of public interest, particularly, governance-and-policy and science and technology and will encourage citizens to use the Internet on their own language.
According to officials, multi-linguality presents a major opportunity for the start-ups for developing innovative solutions and products that can cater to all citizens irrespective of the language they know. “Enabling access to knowledge resources, and digital empowerment of the citizens is of high priority to achieving the goals of Digital India,” said an official.
“Start-ups are an important part of our digital ecosystem and will be supported for developing India-specific and Indian Languages enabled IT solutions through Mission Digital India Bhashini,” he said. The mission will create and nurture an ecosystem involving Central/State government agencies and start-ups, working together to develop and deploy innovative products and services in Indian languages.
“I hope this may lead to more AI/Language based start-ups and ultimately Unicorns”, the minister said. He also remarked that initiatives arising out of the confluence of AI techniques and NLP, such as the development of speech and text translation techniques, will increase the reach of governance.
As public websites become multilingual and interactive, the reach of public welfare schemes will also increase, he said, adding that start-ups should join hands with the government and work in the Mission Digital India Bhashini to break the language barrier, the minister added.
