Amitabh Nag: Breaking Indian language barriers in AI
As the CEO of Bhashini, Nag is helping build the government's platform to make digital content and services more accessible across India's diverse languages
Amitabh Nag’s journey to leading the Digital India Bhashini Division began with his experience in the tech industry. Before joining the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), he worked with tech giants, including Tata Consultancy Services and HP, gathering expertise over four decades. With this wealth of knowledge, Nag joined the Indian government to spearhead Bhashini, an initiative launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2022.
The AI-powered language translation platform aims to make digital content and services more accessible across India’s diverse languages. It bridges the language gap with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). Through Bhashini, Nag is building a suite of communication, translation, and transaction-related services.
“Apart from breaking language barriers, we’re also making digital content more accessible,” he says. “We’re working on improving voice-to-text capabilities, recognising printed text and handwriting, and creating more Indian language content online.” Bhashini supports over 22 Indian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
The AI-based translation tool is designed to facilitate communication between people who speak different languages. As a crowdsourced platform, it allows individuals to contribute to teaching it new languages and dialects. This enables people to communicate in their own language, even when interacting with someone who speaks a different language. The platform handles around 8 to 10 million translation requests daily, which amount to about 300 million translations per month. “Cumulatively, we’ve handled over 2 billion translation requests,” Nag reveals.
Bhashini’s models were developed from scratch using encoder-decoder technologies (a type of AI architecture used for tasks like language translation and text summarisation) and other fundamental AI technologies. According to Nag, the development process involved collaboration with around 70 research institutes across India. “In 2021-2022, when AI was still in its early stages, we reached out to institutes with expertise in language, AI and voice technologies,” he says. They formed consortiums of eight institutes for eight projects, each tasked with building models from the ground up.
Last Updated :
June 06, 25 02:47:56 PM IST