The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under Digital India Corporation and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, participated in the 29th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD-2026) held at IIT Delhi from October 23-25, 2026. Ms. Baishali Chakraborty conducted a workshop titled 'AI BHASHINI: Bridging Divides and Increasing Productivity' that highlighted BHASHINI's Language-First Digital Public Infrastructure capabilities for addressing language barriers in academic settings.
The session demonstrated voice-first multilingual AI, speech-to-text, translation, optical character recognition (OCR), and document translation technologies. A live demonstration of Shrutlekh showcased real-time speech transcription with simultaneous translation for potential applications in lecture halls, research seminars, and academic discussions. BHASHINI has recorded over 10 billion cumulative AI inferences and supports 36 Indian languages for text, 23 Indian languages for voice, and 35 international languages, with its website translation plugin enabling multilingual access across more than 800 government websites.
A key focus was the potential application of AI-powered translation to electronic theses and dissertations, including lengthy specialized academic documents. BHASHINI Pragati, a document translation workbench developed for the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, was presented as an example capable of processing large documents spanning 100 to 500 pages with quality checks and data security considerations. The discussion explored adapting similar workflows for research repositories like Shodhganga maintained by INFLIBNET, as well as universities and higher education institutions.
Harshad Sharma, Senior Manager (Finance) at DIBD, emphasized the importance of making research and scholarly knowledge accessible across Indian languages for a more inclusive knowledge ecosystem. Participants raised questions about translating PDF documents on the fly and the reliability of AI translation for specialized academic content, leading to discussions about combining domain-specific machine translation with human review and quality assurance.
The session also covered BHASHINI's OCR capabilities for extracting text from scanned documents and images, terminology management through SHABD UDYAN, and transliteration to preserve technical terms across scripts. BhashaDaan, BHASHINI's citizen-contribution initiative, was highlighted for building language resources through speech and text contributions, while Granthika was presented as a tool for digitizing and preserving books, manuscripts, and literary works.
BHASHINI invited higher education institutions, research repositories, libraries, and academic organizations to explore collaborations for identifying priority use cases, developing domain-specific language resources, and adapting translation workflows to their specific needs, with the goal of expanding multilingual access to India's scholarly output.