Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) and Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Sign MoU to Strengthen Multilingual Access Across India's Investment Ecosystem

📌 Summary:

• DIBD (under Digital India Corporation, MeitY) and DPIIT (Ministry of Commerce & Industry) signed an MoU under "BHASHINI Seva/Sanchalan – A BHASHINI Sahayogi Program" to strengthen multilingual digital capabilities across India's industry and internal-trade ecosystem
• Goal: enable multilingual access, governance and service delivery in all 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution on DPIIT's digital platforms — for entrepreneurs, startups, investors, businesses & citizens
• Mechanisms: BHASHINI Udyat, Mitra, Appmitra, Pravakta services + translation API integration, domain-specific language model development, multilingual glossary, voice-enabled technologies, linguistic datasets
• Focus on building multilingual AI models for investment promotion, industrial development, innovation and entrepreneurship
• Will enable language-data contributions, awareness, capacity-building, and wider adoption of multilingual AI tools across DPIIT institutions
• BHASHINI scale: powers 800+ government websites; processes 15+ million inferences daily; supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages, 35 international languages

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 S&T — Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), national language AI stack, inclusive governance through technology; GS2 — language equality, Eighth Schedule, federalism of digital governance

📝 Prelims Facts:

• BHASHINI = Bhasha Daan Initiative; India's national AI-based language translation platform
• Operated by Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) under Digital India Corporation (DIC), under MeitY
• National Hub for Language Technology (NHLT) = BHASHINI's technical core
• BHASHINI = part of India's Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) alongside Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, CoWIN, ONDC
• Eighth Schedule of the Constitution recognises 22 languages (originally 14; expanded via amendments — last addition Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, Santhali via 92nd Amendment, 2003)
• DPIIT = Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade; under Ministry of Commerce & Industry; runs Startup India, Make in India, FDI policy
• Scheduled languages first listed under Article 344(1) and Article 351

🔑 Key Term: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — population-scale, interoperable digital systems (identity, payments, data exchange, language) that serve as open, public-good platforms on which private and government services can be built; BHASHINI is the language layer of India's DPI stack.