India-Nepal Collaboration for Multilingual Digital Infrastructure
The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) of India's Ministry of Electronics & IT has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Kathmandu University's Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure & Artificial Intelligence to co-create a National Digital Infrastructure for 'Voice First' Language Translation platform for Nepal. The MoU was signed by Shri Amitabh Nag, CEO of Digital India BHASHINI Division, and Prof. Bal Krishna Bal, Associate Dean of Kathmandu University, during bilateral engagements in New Delhi in the presence of Dr. S. Jaishankar, India's External Affairs Minister, and Shri Shishir Khanal, Nepal's Minister of Foreign Affairs.
The partnership aims to advance Language AI, multilingual digital public infrastructure, and inclusive digital ecosystems across both countries. The collaboration will focus on developing high-quality Nepali language datasets, speech corpora, and multilingual AI resources including speech-to-text, text-to-speech, machine translation, and multilingual conversational AI capabilities. A significant component involves preserving and digitizing the linguistic and literary heritage of low-resource and underrepresented languages across the India-Nepal region to prevent digital extinction of these languages.
Through BHASHINI's open and interoperable language technology ecosystem, the collaboration will support the Government of Nepal in extending digital public services to citizens in their preferred languages, reducing language, literacy, and digital access barriers. The MoU envisions joint research, capacity building, training programs, and pilot projects in Natural Language Processing (NLP), multilingual AI, and Digital Public Infrastructure, bringing together universities, researchers, language experts, and technology practitioners from both countries.
The partnership is expected to create new economic and social opportunities for Nepali citizens, students, entrepreneurs, and professionals by enabling multilingual access to education, skilling, digital commerce, and public services. Digital India BHASHINI Division, under Digital India Corporation, is India's national initiative for AI-driven multilingual digital inclusion and language technology, currently powering over 800 government websites and processing more than 15 million inferences daily across 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages, and 35 international languages.