Context: Recently, Union minister for electronics and information technology said that Mission Bhashini’s capabilities have been integrated with the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to make digital payments through the UPI 123 Pay available in more than 20 local Indian languages.

Bhashini Initiative

• ‘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 easy access to the internet and digital services in their native languages.

How does it work?

• It is aimed to build and develop an ecosystem where various stakeholders 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 ‘Bhashadaan’ section which allows individuals to contribute to multiple crowdsourcing initiatives and it is also accessible via respective Android and iOS apps.

• 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.

Importance of Bhashini

• Bhashini hopes of breaking the massive Indian language barrier and wants developers to offer Indians digital services in their local languages.

• 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.

• 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.

Key initiatives in this regard

• 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 Bhashini 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.”