The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Assam Innovation and Startup Foundation (AISF) to promote language technology, generative AI solutions, and vernacular governance across Assam. The partnership will integrate BHASHINI’s AI-powered language translation platform into Assam’s startup ecosystem, enabling innovators and entrepreneurs to build multilingual digital solutions for local needs. This marks a significant step in taking India’s national language technology infrastructure to the state level, particularly in a linguistically diverse region like the Northeast.
What Is the Digital India BHASHINI Division?
The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) operates under the Digital India Corporation (DIC), which is the implementing agency of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). BHASHINI, which stands for Bhasha Interface for Digital India, was launched in July 2022 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during Digital India Week in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It is the cornerstone of the National Language Translation Mission, one of the key missions identified by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC).
At its core, BHASHINI is India’s national AI-driven language platform. It provides a suite of services including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), machine translation, Text-to-Speech (TTS), and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). These services allow citizens to access digital content and government services in their native languages through both text and voice. The platform powers over 800 government websites and processes more than 15 million AI inferences daily, with cumulative inferences crossing 5 billion since its launch.
BHASHINI supports 36 Indian languages in text, 23 Indian languages in voice, and 35 international languages. It hosts more than 350 AI models and operates on India’s first fully vendor-agnostic AI Sovereign Cloud, ensuring complete data sovereignty. The platform also runs the Bhashadaan initiative, a crowdsourced programme that invites citizens to contribute voice recordings, translations, and other linguistic data to improve AI model accuracy across Indian languages. DIBD is led by CEO Amitabh Nag.
Who Is the Assam Innovation and Startup Foundation?
The Assam Innovation and Startup Foundation (AISF) is a Section 8 company (non-profit) incorporated under the Department of Innovation, Incubation and Start-ups (DIIS), Government of Assam. It was established in August 2025 following a state cabinet decision to create a dedicated institutional framework for building Assam’s startup ecosystem. AISF is headquartered at The Nest in Guwahati and is led by Managing Director Dr Nayanjyoti Goswami.
AISF serves as the operational arm of the Assam Startup and Innovation Policy 2025, a five-year framework that aims to transform Assam into a leading innovation hub in the Northeast. The policy, backed by a ₹397 crore outlay, targets the creation of 10,000 startups and 50,000 jobs by 2030, with at least 20% of supported startups led by women or entrepreneurs from marginalised communities. The state has also established a ₹200 crore Assam Venture Capital Fund to provide early-stage and growth-stage funding to promising ventures.
Since 2021, Assam has incubated 615 startups through The Nest incubation programme, and the state was recognised as a “Leader” in Category A of the Startup India Ranking 2022. AISF has previously partnered with institutions such as IIM Calcutta Innovation Park (IIMCIP) to strengthen mentorship, capacity building, and programme design for the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
What Does the MoU Cover?
The MoU between DIBD and AISF is structured under the BHASHINI Rajyam initiative, a focused programme through which DIBD extends its language technology capabilities to partner organisations across the country. Similar agreements have previously been signed with the Ministry of Ayush, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), the Government e Marketplace (GeM), the Survey of India, and the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).
Under this partnership, DIBD and AISF will integrate BHASHINI’s Language Translation APIs into AISF’s digital platforms and services, enabling real-time translation between Assamese, other regional languages, and English. Reference applications and voice-based interfaces will be developed to make government and startup services accessible through speech, especially for users who prefer speaking over typing in their native language.
The Bhashadaan crowdsourced platform will be used to collect, curate, and disseminate linguistic data from Assam, including Assamese and other languages spoken in the state such as Bodo, Mising, and Karbi. DIBD will also customise its language models to capture regional dialects and linguistic nuances specific to Assam, and will continuously improve these models through machine learning and user feedback.
Division of Responsibilities
The agreement clearly defines the roles of each partner. DIBD will provide AI-based translation services across government platforms, offer technical support and training, create dashboards for API integration, and ensure that translation models are tailored to Assam’s linguistic landscape. AISF will identify specific linguistic needs across the state, prioritise which languages require translation services first, support ecosystem participation by startups and academic institutions, and encourage collaboration among innovators, researchers, and entrepreneurs.
Why This Partnership Matters for Assam
Assam is home to a rich linguistic landscape. While Assamese is the official language and most widely spoken, the state also has significant populations speaking Bodo (also recognised in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution), Mising, Karbi, Rabha, Tiwa, Deori, and several other indigenous languages. Many of these languages have limited digital presence, and their speakers often face barriers in accessing online services, government portals, and digital information.
This partnership directly addresses that gap. By bringing BHASHINI’s AI language stack to Assam, the agreement enables startups and innovators to build tools that can serve speakers of these languages. A Bodo-speaking entrepreneur, for instance, can now leverage BHASHINI’s APIs to create a voice-based health information service in Bodo, using pre-trained models and linguistic datasets provided through the platform.
The collaboration also strengthens Assam’s already growing reputation as a technology hub in the Northeast. Local initiatives such as Digitizing Assam 2.0, which has made 2.76 million pages of Assamese literature searchable online, and Borno Labs, which developed the Aakhor AI speech-to-text platform for Assamese, demonstrate that the state has both the talent and the ambition to lead in regional language AI. This MoU gives these efforts a national-level technological backbone to scale further.
For Assam’s startup ecosystem, access to BHASHINI’s technology stack removes a major entry barrier. Startups no longer need to build language AI models from scratch. They can plug into a platform that already supports over 350 models across 36 Indian languages and focus their energy on solving local problems in governance, agriculture, education, healthcare, and tourism.
Key Takeaways
- The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) signed an MoU with the Assam Innovation and Startup Foundation (AISF) in June 2026 to promote language technology and Generative AI in Assam.
- BHASHINI was launched in July 2022 as part of the National Language Translation Mission and operates under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- The platform powers over 800 government websites, processes more than 15 million AI inferences daily, and supports 36 Indian languages in text and 23 in voice.
- AISF is a Section 8 company under the Department of Innovation, Incubation and Start-ups (DIIS), Government of Assam, established in August 2025 as the operational arm of the Assam Startup and Innovation Policy 2025.
- The MoU will enable integration of BHASHINI’s Language Translation APIs into Assam’s digital platforms, develop voice-enabled solutions, and strengthen linguistic data collection through Bhashadaan.
- The Assam Startup and Innovation Policy 2025 is backed by a ₹397 crore outlay and targets 10,000 startups and 50,000 jobs by 2030.
