New Delhi, June 16 (IANS) A new government initiative aims to strengthen multilingual digital capabilities across India’s public procurement ecosystem through the BHASHINI Platform, India’s national language Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).

The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) and Government e-Marketplace (GeM) have signed an MoU to promote multilingual access, multilingual governance, and multilingual service delivery across GeM’s digital platforms, enabling stakeholders to access information and services in their preferred languages.

“BHASHINI is committed to making digital public infrastructure truly inclusive by enabling citizens and enterprises to interact in their preferred Indian languages. Our collaboration with GeM will help democratise access to public procurement through multilingual and voice-enabled technologies, ensuring that language is no longer a barrier to participation,” said Amitabh Nag, CEO, Digital India BHASHINI Division.

The initiative seeks to advance ‘Voice First’ language technology infrastructure and Generative AI solutions while supporting seamless interaction across 22 officially recognised Indian languages and other Indian languages, according to IT Ministry.

GeM and the BHASHINI team will work towards the co-creation, integration, and deployment of multilingual digital public resources through initiatives including BHASHINI Udyat, Mitra, Appmitra, Sahyogi, and Pravakta.

According to an official statement, the collaboration will support translation API integration, domain-specific language model development, multilingual glossary creation, voice-enabled technologies, reference applications, voice bots, and linguistic dataset development to strengthen multilingual capabilities across the GeM ecosystem.

Moreover, the initiative will support the development of a more inclusive public procurement ecosystem by reducing language barriers and enabling inclusive and equitable language accessibility across procurement services, seller onboarding, platform navigation, communication, and stakeholder engagement.

The collaboration will also focus on strengthening multilingual AI models and language technologies tailored to the needs of public procurement, government service delivery, commerce, and business participation, enabling seamless voice-first multilingual experiences across India’s diverse linguistic landscape.

The MoU will further encourage language data contributions through Bhashadaan, awareness initiatives, capacity-building efforts, and wider adoption of multilingual AI tools across institutions and stakeholders associated with the GeM ecosystem.

It will also support the collection, curation, and dissemination of linguistic resources to enhance multilingual support across procurement services, said the ministry.

—IANS

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