Digital India Bhashini signs MoU with Kathmandu University for co-creating national digital infrastructure for 'voice first' language translation platform for Nepal
New Delhi, June 7
The Digital India Bhashini Division, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Kathmandu University's Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence, Nepal, to establish a collaborative framework for advancing Language AI, multilingual digital public infrastructure and inclusive digital ecosystems across India and Nepal.
The MoU was signed by Amitabh Nag, CEO, Digital India Bhashini Division and Professor Bal Krishna Bal, Associate Dean, Kathmandu University.
The exchange of the MoU took place in the presence of S Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India, and Shishir Khanal, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nepal, during bilateral engagements held in New Delhi. The occasion underscored the shared commitment of India and Nepal towards strengthening cooperation in emerging technologies, Digital Public Infrastructure, and inclusive digital transformation.
The partnership reflects the shared vision of India and Nepal to leverage technology for inclusive growth, social empowerment, and regional cooperation. Going beyond a technology collaboration, the MoU is envisioned as an initiative to strengthen people-to-people connections, preserve linguistic heritage, and enable equitable access to opportunities by overcoming language, literacy, and digital barriers across the region.
Under the MoU, the two institutions will collaborate on the development of 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.
The partnership will also support the preservation and digitisation of linguistic and literary heritage of low-resource and underrepresented languages across the India-Nepal region, ensuring that communities whose languages risk digital extinction have access to AI-enabled tools and services in their mother tongue.
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 at the last mile.
The MoU further envisions joint research, capacity building, training programmes 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 also 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, both within Nepal and across regional and global markets.
CEO of Digital India Bhashini Division, Amitabh Nag said, "This partnership with Kathmandu University represents a significant step in India's commitment to building inclusive language technology for the region. BHASHINI's open Digital Public Infrastructure model has the potential to transform digital access for millions of citizens across South Asia, and this collaboration will help us extend that vision beyond India's borders, strengthening our shared linguistic and cultural heritage while building the next generation of multilingual AI for the Global South."
Professor Bal Krishna Bal, Associate Dean at Kathmandu University, said, "This MoU reflects a shared commitment between Nepal and India to harness the power of artificial intelligence for linguistic inclusion and social impact. Through collaboration between the DPI-AI Centre at Kathmandu University and Bhashini, we seek to advance research, innovation and capacity building in multilingual AI, ensuring that our rich linguistic heritage becomes a catalyst--not a barrier--for participation in the digital future."
— ANI
Reader Comments
Finally, some concrete cooperation in the tech sector between India and Nepal! Language barriers are a huge issue for our neighbors when accessing digital services. Bhashini's open-source model is perfect for Nepal. I just hope this isn't just a photo-op and actually leads to tangible benefits for common people in both countries who speak lesser-known dialects. The mention of 'voice first' is key—so many people are not literate but can speak.
Great initiative but let's see the execution. We have seen many MoUs between India and Nepal that never materialize. The real test will be if this helps a farmer in rural Nepal get weather alerts or market prices in Nepali or Maithili through a simple voice call. The joint research component is promising—Kathmandu University has good linguistics programs. Hope this also includes some scholarships for Nepali students to study AI/ML in India.
As someone from the US who works in NLP, I find this partnership fascinating. India's Bhashini platform is truly ambitious—it aims to be the 'UPI of language'. Bringing Nepal into this open digital public infrastructure model is smart. It creates a larger dataset for training models for South Asian languages, which are often ignored by big tech. The 'voice first' aspect is also very appropriate for mobile-first countries like India and Nepal. Hope this can be replicated with other neighbors like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in the future!
Good step, but I have a slight concern. While preserving linguistic heritage is noble, we also need to ensure that the AI models are robust and not biased. For example, if the speech-to-text model is trained mainly on urban Nepali speakers from Kathmandu, it may fail for speakers of Tharu, Newari, or Limbu from the Terai or hills. The MoU mentions 'low-resource languages', which is good, but will the Nepali government also provide equal access to its internal data? Let's hope this isn
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