Govt seeks bids from colleges, universities for help on Bhashini proliferation

The government has sought bids from higher education institutes, and standalone startup incubators to come up with ways to increase the adoption of Bhashini, the natural language processing service.

In its request-for-empanelment tender, the ministry of electronics and information technology has said that higher education institutes and incubators that apply for the program must work to enhance and increase the adoption of the Bhashini platform for all Indian languages and geographies.

The IT ministry has asked the bids to be submitted by July 10.


The bidders must also be able to conduct research projects which can improve the accuracy and fluency of machine translation for specific language pairs, work on domain-specific language models for government, education,
healthcare, and other critical sectors, develop and participate in multilingual benchmarking initiatives to assess the progress of machine translation models for Indian languages.

These higher education institutes must also “dedicate research efforts to improve the capabilities of the BHASHINI platform for under-resourced Indian languages with limited digital presence” and explore collaborations with linguistic communities for data collection and annotation.

The National Language Translation Mission, which was re-christened as Bhashini in 2022, fosters an ecosystem that helps real-time translation of local Indian languages by facilitating access to open-source databases and translation tools.