Digital India BHASHINI Division CEO Amitabh Nag addressed Lattice 2026, the annual business conclave at IIM Calcutta, focusing on India's experience in building and deploying language technology as Digital Public Infrastructure. The presentation highlighted the challenges of moving AI from experimental models to real-world adoption at population scale, particularly addressing India's interconnected digital, language, and literacy divides.
Nag emphasized that technology must adapt to people's contexts, advocating for voice-first and multilingual technologies to expand access. He noted that India's diversity requires AI systems to account for differences in language, dialect, domain, and context. During the session, BHASHINI's Shrutlekh platform was deployed live, demonstrating real-time language translation and transcription capabilities in a practical setting beyond controlled environments.
The discussion covered organizational and product design challenges, with Nag stating that the hardest problems were never about the model but about "market design, incentive design, organisational design, and ecosystem design." He highlighted the importance of community participation through BhashaDaan for creating language resources, clear use cases, rapid experimentation, learning from failure, and short feedback loops. The CEO emphasized that organizations working with emerging technologies need to build a culture of conversation, experimentation, brainstorming, and partnership.
BHASHINI's operational scale was detailed: the platform powers over 800 government websites, has enabled more than 9 billion cumulative AI inferences, processes over 24 million AI inferences daily, and supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages, and 35 international languages. Nag encouraged students to focus on creating ecosystem standards and network effects rather than individual applications, reflecting the platform approach to digital inclusion.