Digital India BHASHINI Division CEO Amitabh Nag addressed the Lattice 2026 business conclave at IIM Calcutta, focusing on building AI ecosystems for population-scale impact. The conclave, held under the theme 'The Capability Decade', brought together students, industry leaders and professionals to discuss artificial intelligence, technology, innovation and leadership requirements in an evolving technology landscape.
Nag highlighted the interconnected challenges of digital, language and literacy divides, emphasizing that technology must adapt to people and their contexts rather than expecting people to adapt to technology. He stressed the critical importance of voice-first and multilingual technologies in expanding access, noting 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 as Nag spoke, demonstrating real-time language translation and transcription capabilities. This practical demonstration showcased how language AI can operate in live settings and support multilingual communication beyond controlled or experimental environments, representing a significant advancement in deployable AI solutions.
Nag discussed the organizational and product design challenges in emerging technologies, noting that the hardest problems faced were rarely about the model itself but rather about market design, incentive design, organizational design, and ecosystem design. He emphasized building with people and for people, including community participation in creating language resources through BhashaDaan. The approach focuses on clear use cases, rapid experimentation, learning from failure, and short feedback loops to move from ideas to deployable solutions while bringing research and product teams closer to real-world requirements.
The discussion highlighted the role of partnerships, open infrastructure, co-creation and teamwork in taking technology beyond individual products. Nag emphasized that organizations working with emerging technologies need to build a culture of conversation, experimentation, brainstorming and partnership while creating infrastructure that enables multiple participants to contribute to a larger ecosystem.
About Digital India BHASHINI Division: The organization, under Digital India Corporation and MeitY, is India's national platform for AI-powered multilingual digital inclusion. It 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, making Digital Public Infrastructure more accessible through Language AI.