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, the country’s national language Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) and the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote multilingual access, governance and service delivery across GeM’s digital platforms, enabling users to access information and services in their preferred languages. According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the collaboration will support ‘Voice First’ language technologies and Generative AI solutions while facilitating seamless interaction across the 22 officially recognised Indian languages and other regional languages. BHASHINI CEO Amitabh Nag said the partnership is aimed at making digital public infrastructure more inclusive and ensuring that language does not become a barrier to participation in public procurement.
Under the collaboration, GeM and the BHASHINI team will work on the co-creation, integration and deployment of multilingual digital public resources through initiatives such as BHASHINI Udyat, Mitra, Appmitra, Sahyogi and Pravakta. The partnership will support translation API integration, development of domain-specific language models, multilingual glossaries, voice-enabled technologies, reference applications, voice bots and linguistic datasets to strengthen multilingual capabilities across the GeM ecosystem. The initiative is expected to improve accessibility by reducing language barriers in procurement services, seller onboarding, platform navigation, communication and stakeholder engagement. It will also focus on developing multilingual AI models tailored to public procurement, government service delivery, commerce and business participation, enabling voice-first multilingual experiences across India’s diverse linguistic landscape. Additionally, the MoU will encourage language data contributions through Bhashadaan, capacity-building programmes and wider adoption of multilingual AI tools while supporting the collection and dissemination of linguistic resources to enhance language accessibility across procurement services.