Lok Sabha Question No. 1604 (UNSTARRED), answered on 2026-02-09
Subject: AI Language Assamese and other Languages
Ministry: EDUCATION
Asked by: Shri Parimal Suklabaidya

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION

## LOK SABHA

## STARRED QUESTION NO. 1604

ANSWERED ON 09.02.2026

## AI LANGUAGE ASSAMESE AND OTHER LANGUAGES

†1604. SHRI PARIMAL SUKLABAIDYA:

Will the Minister of EDUCATION be pleased to state:

- (a) the details of initiatives undertaken by the Government to promote all the 22 Scheduled Indian languages through AI-based language platforms such as Bhashini and BharatGen and the progress achieved so far, in this regard;
- (b) the extent of digitisation of linguistic data, development of multilingual AI tools and creation of open language datasets under these initiatives, with special reference to languages spoken in Assam, including Assamese, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri and other languages of the Barak Valley and Cachar district;
- (c) the role played by academic institutions, startups and public sector agencies, particularly from the North Eastern Region, in the development and deployment of these language technologies; and
- (d) whether the Government proposes to expand the use of these platforms for education, governance and public service delivery in linguistically diverse districts such as Cachar district in Assam and if so, the details thereof?

## ANSWER

## MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION (DR. SUKANTA MAJUMDAR)

- (a)  to  (d):  The  National  Education  Policy  (NEP)  2020  highlights  the  importance  of multilingualism  and  places  strong  emphasis  on  the  promotion  of  all  Indian  languages.  In alignment with the objectives of NEP 2020, the Government of India has undertaken several initiatives promoting education, preservation and research on Indian languages. These efforts have  further  been  augmented  through  the  adoption  of  Artificial  Intelligence  and  Machine Learning  (AI/ML)  technologies,  including  the  development  of  Large  Language  Models, translation tools and language-enabled digital services in Indian languages.

Government  of  India  has  started  the  BharatGen  project,  which  is  a  multimodal  Large Language  Model  Project  focused  on  developing  efficient  and  inclusive  AI  solutions  that support all 22 Scheduled languages and enable the creation of a robust digital AI infrastructure for  India's  unique  socio-cultural  context  and  diverse  sectors.  BharatGen  is  anchored  at  IIT Bombay, where the core development of language technologies is undertaken. The initiative is implemented through a consortium of leading academic institutions including IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Mandi.

Further, to facilitate the translation of content into Indian languages, technological advancements include the development of AI-based translation tools such as ANUVADINI by  the  All  India  Council  of  Technical  Education  (AICTE)  and  BHASHINI,  an  initiative under the Digital India Programme by M/o Electronics and Information Technology.

BHASHINI  has  developed  state-of-the-art  AI  models  for  Indian  languages  through  a collaboration of over 70 research partner institutes. BHASHINI platform hosts a repository of over three hundred fifty AI-based language models and provides more than 22 specialized language  services.  These  services  include  Automatic  Speech  Recognition  (ASR),  Machine Translation (MT), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Optical Character Recognition (OCR)  and Transliteration.    The  dataset  corpus  includes  246  million  parallel  sentence  pairs  and  3.7 million  monolingual  text  entries.  All  datasets  and  models  are  publicly  accessible  via BHASHINI  platform  or  through  the  Digital  India  BHASHINI  Division  account  on  the AIKosh platform. Further, the National Language Translation Mission through the BHASHINI  platform  is  digitising  large  volumes  of  text  and  speech  data  across  all  22 scheduled languages.

BHASHINI follows a multi-stakeholder participation model involving academic and research institutions  including  from  the  North  Eastern  Region  for  fundamental  research,  dataset preparation and development of baseline AI models. BHASHINI has taken steps to support Assamese, Bengali and other Indian languages in collaboration with Government of Assam for use in digital governance platforms and citizen services, including those in linguistically diverse districts such as Cachar. These include integration of translation plugins, facilitating access to APIs etc.

Further, extensive linguistic resources for scheduled Indian Languages have been developed by the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) of the Ministry of Education under the Linguistic Data Consortium for  Indian  Languages (LDC-IL) scheme. Since 2019, LDC-IL has provided resources to government agencies, government-promoted initiatives, researchers, and commercial and industrial users engaged in developing language technologies. The resources released for the Assamese language include a Raw Text Corpus, Raw  Speech  Corpus,  Sentence-Aligned  Speech  Corpus,  TTS  Corpus  and  Mother  Tongue Parallel  Text  Corpus.  Apart  from  the  datasets,  LDC-IL  has  also  developed  web-based applications and tools to support research and development in Indian languages. Several of these tools, hosted at CIIL data centres, are accessible through the Medha Bhashika website https://medha.ciil.org.

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