The Digital India Corporation’s (DIC) ‘Digital India Bhashini Division’ (DIBD), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), participated in the 29th International Conference on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD‑2026) held at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi from 23 to 25 October 2026. On behalf of DIBD, Ms Baisali Chakravarti conducted a session on the multilingual artificial‑intelligence capabilities of ‘Bhashini’ (BHASHINI) and its potential to make scholarly knowledge more accessible in various languages
The session titled “AI Bhashini Workshop: Bridging Gaps and Boosting Productivity” highlighted how Bhashini’s language‑first digital public infrastructure (DPI) can help higher‑education institutions, libraries and research archives overcome language barriers and expand access to academic content
During the session, Ms Chakravarti demonstrated how voice‑first multilingual AI, speech‑to‑text, translation, optical character recognition (OCR) and document translation can enhance multilingual access in academic and research institutions. A live demo showed real‑time speech transcription with simultaneous translation, illustrating possible uses in lecture halls, research seminars, conferences and scholarly discussions
The session also spotlighted Bhashini’s extensive multilingual AI ecosystem, which brings together language datasets, AI models, APIs and applications to support diverse language‑technology use cases. Bhashini has logged over 10 billion cumulative AI inferences and supports 36 Indian languages for text, 23 Indian languages for voice and 35 international languages. Its website‑translation plug‑in enables multilingual access on more than 800 government sites
The discussion focused on extending AI‑based translation to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), including long and specialised academic documents. A document‑translation workflow developed for India’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) was presented as an example of Bhashini’s progress in structured document translation and review. The workflow supports quality checks and data‑security considerations for processing large documents of 100 to 500 pages
The panel also explored how similar workflows could be adapted for research repositories such as Shodhganga, powered by InfloNet, as well as for universities and other higher‑education institutions. Such solutions can preserve document structure, specialised terminology and meaning while making theses, dissertations, research reports and other scholarly material available in Indian languages
At the event, Harshad Sharma, Senior Manager (Finance) of the Digital India Bhashini Division, said, “Making research and scholarly knowledge accessible in Indian languages is a vital step toward a more inclusive knowledge ecosystem. Multilingual AI capabilities like Bhashini’s document‑translation and speech technologies can help universities, libraries and research repositories reach a broader audience. Engaging with academic institutions will be key to understanding their needs and developing reliable multilingual solutions for theses, dissertations and other research outputs.”
During the discussion participants raised questions about instant PDF translation and the reliability of AI translation for specialised academic and scientific content. Ms Chakravarti emphasized the importance of coupling domain‑specific machine translation with human review and quality assurance. Opportunities to work with research organisations to understand their requirements and co‑create tailored solutions for their repositories and academic domains were also discussed
The session incorporated Bhashini’s OCR capabilities for transliteration, enabling extraction of text from scanned documents and images, vocabulary management through word‑gardens, and preservation of technical terms, names and expressions in scripts. These capabilities can support workflows that respect the linguistic and formatting needs of academic documents while improving discoverability and access to research material
Beyond translation, the session highlighted Bhashini’s ‘Bhashadaan’ citizen‑contribution initiative, which helps build and enrich language resources through speech and text contributions, audio transcription and text extraction from images and documents. The tool Granthika was presented as a means to digitise and preserve books, manuscripts, literary works, folk tales and oral histories, contributing to the development of digital resources for India’s multilingual knowledge ecosystem
Bhashini invited higher‑education institutions, research repositories, libraries and scholarly organisations to identify priority use cases, develop domain‑specific language resources and collaborate on tailoring translation workflows to their needs. Such engagement can help meet repository‑focused requirements, strengthen translation quality through human verification and expand multilingual access to Indian scholars’ output
Bhashini’s participation in ETD‑2026 underscores its broader mission to advance language technology as a public digital resource. Engagement with academic institutions and research repositories offers an opportunity to extend multilingual AI capabilities for scholarly communication, helping research and knowledge cross linguistic boundaries to reach wider audiences
About the Digital India Bhashini Division
Under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Digital India Corporation’s (DIC) ‘Digital India Bhashini Division’ (DIBD) is advancing India’s ‘language‑first’ digital public infrastructure to enable multilingual access to digital services. Bhashini brings together language datasets, AI models, APIs and applications to help government departments, developers, researchers and other stakeholders build multilingual AI solutions. It supports over 800 government websites, can perform more than 10 billion AI inferences and supports 36 Indian languages for text, 23 Indian languages for voice and 35 international languages, thereby advancing language technology across India’s digital ecosystem