The Ministry of Panchayati Raj signed an MoU with Bhashini, an initiative by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. This partnership will use AI-enabled translation to make digital portals accessible in multiple languages, empowering Panchayati Raj Institutions, fostering inclusion, and strengthening grassroots democracy across the country.
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The Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Bhashini initiative, which operates under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
The MoU aims to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to eliminate language barriers in rural governance, making digital services and information accessible to everyone, regardless of their native language.
By providing information in local languages, the initiative empowers elected representatives and officials at the Panchayat level to understand policies, schemes, and official communications better.
BHASHINI stands for BHASHa INterface for India, is an AI-powered language translation platform being developed as a national public digital infrastructure.
It was launched in July 2022, as part of the Digital India initiative to make digital content and services available in all major Indian languages by building a vast ecosystem of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for speech-to-text, text-to-text translation, and more.
The initiative operates under the National Language Technology Mission (NLTM) and is managed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
BhashaDaan => A crowdsourcing component. It encourages citizens to contribute and validate language data in various forms—text, speech, and images. This collective effort helps build the massive datasets required to train accurate AI models.
BhashaSangam => Core translation and processing engine. It houses over 300 pre-trained AI models for various language tasks, which are available to partners through open APIs.
BhashaSetu => Acts as the bridge, allowing the integration of Bhashini's tools into various government and private digital platforms through APIs. It enables real-time, seamless translation on websites and applications.
BhashaNidhi => Repository of all validated language datasets, which serves as a national resource for building and improving language technologies.
The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has launched "Saarthi," an application that uses Bhashini to help businesses create multilingual buyer-side apps, making e-commerce more accessible.
The Ministry of Panchayati Raj signed an MoU with Bhashini to make its portals and information accessible in local languages, empowering grassroots governance.
The Rajasthan government developed the "Pehchan" app, which integrates Bhashini's AI to allow citizens to register births and deaths using voice commands in different languages.
Bhashini has signed MoUs with private companies like Snapdeal and Federal Bank to provide AI-powered vernacular language solutions for their customers.
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PRACTICE QUESTION Q. The "Bhasha Daan" initiative is a key part of the BHASHINI mission. What is its main purpose? A) To collect financial donations for the mission. B) To recruit volunteers for teaching languages in rural areas. C) To crowdsource and collect language data from native speakers to train AI models. D) To organize annual language-themed cultural festivals across India. Answer: C Explanation: "Bhasha Daan" is a crowdsourcing initiative designed to collect vast amounts of language data (text, speech, etc.) directly from the public. This data is crucial for training and improving the accuracy of the AI models that power the BHASHINI translation and voice recognition services. |
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