Explained: What is Bhashini and how it can bridge the gap between Indian languages

The government of India has added several digital economy initiatives at the Digital India Week 2022 event in Gandhinagar. ‘Bhashini,’ one of these initiatives, is a local language translation mission that aims to break the barrier between various Indian tongues by using available technology. This government platform aims to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources available in the public domain to be used by — Indian MSMEs, startups and individual innovators. This will help developers to offer all Indians an easy access to the internet and digital services in their native languages. The Ministry of Electronics and IT has recently talked about the Bhashini project in a tweet shared from its official Twitter account.

How does it work
The project is available on this website: https://www.bhashini.gov.in/en/ and it is aimed to build and develop an ecosystem where various stakeholders like — institutions, industry players, research groups, academia and individuals can unite to maintain an ‘ever-evolving repository of data, training and benchmark datasets, open models, tools and technologies.’
This online platform also has a separate ‘Bhasadaan’ section which allows individuals to contribute to multiple crowdsourcing initiatives. The contribution can be done in four ways — Suno India, Likho India, Bolo India and Dekho India — where users have to type what they hear or have to validate texts transcribed by others.
Currently, the open repository has 1501, 598, 773 and 664 contributors in each section in the order mentioned above, respectively. These contributions can help to improve the open repository of data to “digitally enrich their native language,” the website reads. Moreover, the site even awards contributors with Bhasa Samarthak badges. Internet users can earn a bronze Bhasha Samarthak badge just by contributing five sentences.

Importance of Bhashini
According to Census 2001, India has 22 official languages, 122 major languages and 1599 other languages. However, most of the content available on the web in this present age of digitalisation is in English. The government of India has launched this project in the hopes of breaking the massive Indian language barrier and wants developers to offer Indians digital services in their local languages.
As per a report by Analytics India Magazine, the project not only has a massive size and magnitude but also has several benefits. India has a chance to create a roadmap to allow internet access for local languages, the report states. Moreover, this is important considering the increased availability of smartphones and cheaper data rates are allowing the internet to penetrate the remote and rural areas of the country.
The report also mentions that public initiatives often struggle due to the shortage of data. In this case, Bhashini will break the barrier of Indian languages and level the playing field. Nowadays, most of the content available on the web is usually in English, followed by Chinese and other languages. The report notes that no Indian language makes the top ten list which shows a “staggering lack of content in the local languages.”
The National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) was announced in the 2021-22 budget by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The reason behind introducing this mission was a survey that concluded that 53% of Indians who don’t access the internet have said that they would start using the web if it had content available in their native languages.

This is where Bhasini comes in with the sole purpose of developing a national digital public platform for languages to provide universal access to content. This is expected to improve the delivery of digital content in all Indian languages.
Finally, it will help in creating a knowledge-based society where information is freely and readily available which will make the ecosystem and citizens “Atmanirbhar.” By using these public digital assets, the government wants to achieve its goal for platforms like — UPI, Cowin, ONDC and others.