BHASHINI Division of Digital India Corporation participates in ETD-2026, demonstrating its multilingual AI capabilities for academic and research settings.
The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), showcased its multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities at the 29th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD-2026), held at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi from October 23 to 25, 2026. Ms. Baishali Chakraborty, speaking on behalf of DIBD, conducted a session highlighting BHASHINI’s potential in making scholarly knowledge more accessible across languages.
The 'Workshop on AI BHASHINI: Bridging Divides and Increasing Productivity' session demonstrated how BHASHINI’s Language-First Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) can support higher education institutions, libraries, and research repositories in addressing language barriers and expanding access to academic content.
Ms. Chakraborty presented various AI functionalities such as voice-first multilingual AI, speech-to-text, translation, optical character recognition (OCR), and document translation that can support multilingual access in academic and research settings. A live demonstration illustrated real-time speech transcription with simultaneous translation, showcasing its potential applications in lecture halls, research seminars, conferences, and academic discussions.
The session also covered BHASHINI’s broader multilingual AI ecosystem, which encompasses language datasets, AI models, APIs, and applications to support various language technology use cases. As of the presentation, BHASHINI has recorded over 10 billion cumulative AI inferences across 36 Indian languages for text, 23 Indian languages for voice, and 35 international languages. Its website translation plugin enables multilingual access across more than 800 government websites.
A key focus of the session was extending AI-powered translation to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), including lengthy and specialized academic documents. A document translation workbench developed for the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) was presented as an example of structured document translation and review, supporting the processing of large documents with quality checks and data security considerations.
The discussion explored opportunities to adapt similar workflows for research repositories such as Shodhganga, maintained by INFLIBNET, as well as universities and other higher education institutions. Such solutions could help make theses, dissertations, research reports, and other scholarly material available across Indian languages while preserving document structure, specialized terminology, and meaning.
Harshad Sharma, Senior Manager (Finance), Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), emphasized the importance of making research and scholarly knowledge accessible across Indian languages to create a more inclusive knowledge ecosystem. He stated that BHASHINI’s multilingual AI capabilities could help universities, libraries, and research repositories reach wider audiences by developing reliable solutions for multilingual access to theses, dissertations, and other research content.
Source:
Press Information Bureau
