The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under the Digital India Corporation, ministry of Electronics and IT, and Government e Marketplace (GeM), the national public procurement portal under the ministry of Commerce and Industry, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) under “BHASHINI for Seva/Sanchalan – A BHASHINI Sahayogi Program” to strengthen multilingual digital capabilities across India’s public procurement ecosystem through the BHASHINI Platform, India’s national language digital public infrastructure.
The collaboration aims to promote multilingual access, multilingual governance, and multilingual service delivery across GeM’s digital platforms, enabling stakeholders to access information and services in their preferred languages. The initiative seeks to advance voice first language technology infrastructure and generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions while supporting seamless interaction across 22 officially recognised Indian languages and other Indian languages.
Under the collaboration, GeM and the BHASHINI team will work towards the co-creation, integration, and deployment of multilingual digital public resources through initiatives including BHASHINI Udyat, Mitra, Appmitra, Sahyogi, and Pravakta. The collaboration will support translation application programming interface integration, domain-specific language model development, multilingual glossary creation, voice-enabled technologies, reference applications, voice bots, and linguistic dataset development to strengthen multilingual capabilities across the GeM ecosystem.
The collaboration will also focus on strengthening multilingual AI models and language technologies tailored to the needs of public procurement, government service delivery, commerce, and business participation, enabling seamless voice-first multilingual experiences across India’s diverse linguistic landscape.
The MoU will further encourage language data contributions through Bhashadaan, awareness initiatives, capacity-building efforts, and wider adoption of multilingual AI tools across institutions and stakeholders associated with the GeM ecosystem. The collaboration will also support the collection, curation, and dissemination of linguistic resources to enhance multilingual support across procurement services.
As part of the collaboration, GeM and DIBD may jointly explore and support specific initiatives aimed at strengthening multilingual digital infrastructure, expanding access to procurement services, promoting innovation, and enabling broader adoption of language technologies across the public procurement ecosystem.
Commenting on the development, additional chief executive officer and chief seller officer, GeM, said, “The collaboration aims to leverage BHASHINI’s AI-powered language technologies to break linguistic barriers in public procurement and make GeM more accessible to buyers and sellers across the country. BHASHINI is committed to making digital public infrastructure truly inclusive by enabling citizens and enterprises to interact in their preferred Indian languages. Our collaboration with GeM will help democratise access to public procurement through multilingual and voice-enabled technologies, ensuring that language is no longer a barrier to participation. Together, we are empowering local businesses, MSMEs, startups, and Swadeshi enterprises to connect with national opportunities while strengthening India’s vision of a digitally inclusive economy.”