The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence (DPI-AI) at Kathmandu University, Nepal, on June 6, 2026, in New Delhi. The agreement aims to advance language artificial intelligence (AI), develop multilingual digital public infrastructure (DPI), and build inclusive digital ecosystems in both nations. This partnership marks a significant step forward in bilateral digital cooperation, targeting the linguistic barriers that restrict access to digital services.
Strengthening Digital Ties Between India and Nepal
The MoU was formally signed by Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, and Professor Bal Krishna Bal, Associate Dean at Kathmandu University. The official exchange of the agreement took place in New Delhi during a bilateral session. India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar, and Nepal’s Foreign Minister, Shishir Khanal, were present at the event, highlighting the geopolitical and strategic significance of this technology sharing.
This agreement reflects a broader shift in India-Nepal relations toward digital development diplomacy. By sharing advanced technologies, India aims to strengthen regional connectivity and offer open-source models for digital public services. The collaboration moves bilateral engagement beyond traditional physical infrastructure to focus on digital empowerment, knowledge exchange, and joint technological research.
Core Features and Key Areas of Collaboration
The partnership covers several technological and cultural domains, with an emphasis on creating open-source language models. The primary initiatives under the MoU include:
Enhancing Language AI and Multilingual Support
The two institutions will collaborate to build advanced language processing technologies. This involves co-developing high-quality Nepali language datasets, speech corpora, speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems, and machine translation models. These tools will power multilingual conversational AI, making digital communication and local databases accessible in the native language.
Bridging the Digital Divide and Preserving Cultural Heritage
A major objective of the collaboration is the development of a voice-first language translation platform for Nepal. This platform will help individuals with low literacy or limited English access digital services using voice commands in their native languages. Additionally, the partnership will focus on digitizing and preserving the unique linguistic and literary heritage of underrepresented languages across the India-Nepal region.
Understanding the BHASHINI Initiative
The BHASHINI initiative, short for Bhasha Interface for India, was launched in July 2022 by the Government of India. The platform is designed as a public digital infrastructure under the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM). The mission was conceptualized by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC) to build a multilingual ecosystem using artificial intelligence.
BHASHINI aims to eliminate language barriers across India by leveraging technologies such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation, text-to-speech (TTS), and optical character recognition (OCR). The initiative is implemented by the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), an independent business unit under the Digital India Corporation (DIC) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). By providing open-source models and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the division enables startups, government departments, and developers to build inclusive digital solutions.
Citizens as Contributors: Bhasha Daan
A unique aspect of the BHASHINI platform is the Bhasha Daan initiative, a citizen-driven crowdsourcing project. Bhasha Daan allows citizens to contribute language data, such as voice recordings, sentences, and translations, in their respective mother tongues. These crowdsourced contributions help train and refine the artificial intelligence models, particularly for low-resource regional languages that lack large commercial datasets. Contributors are recognized as language contributors, playing an active role in building the public digital database.
Digital Diplomacy and the South Asian DPI Landscape
The partnership represents a key milestone in India’s digital diplomacy strategy, which promotes the export of the India Stack as a global public good. India’s approach to digital public infrastructure emphasizes open, interoperable, and scalable models. This framework provides an alternative to proprietary corporate systems, allowing partner nations to build sovereign digital platforms tailored to their local requirements.
The collaborative effort between the BHASHINI division and Kathmandu University builds on a growing network of digital linkages between India and Nepal. Notably, the two countries recently linked India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with Nepal’s National Payments Interface (NPI) to enable instant, low-cost cross-border peer-to-peer financial remittances. Extending this cooperation to language AI ensures that the benefits of digital finance and governance can reach rural populations who speak underrepresented or low-resource languages, fostering deeper regional integration.
Key Takeaways
- The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) signed an MoU with Kathmandu University’s Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence (DPI-AI) on June 6, 2026, in New Delhi.
- The MoU was signed by DIBD Chief Executive Officer Amitabh Nag and Kathmandu University Associate Dean Professor Bal Krishna Bal.
- The partnership aims to build a voice-first language translation platform and co-develop high-quality Nepali datasets, speech corpora, and machine translation systems.
- The BHASHINI initiative was launched in July 2022 under the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM), conceptualized by the PM-STIAC.
- The division operates under the Digital India Corporation (DIC) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- The digital partnership follows the recent integration of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with Nepal’s National Payments Interface (NPI) for cross-border financial transactions.
