India has 22 official languages, but over 1,200 spoken languages. For decades, this meant a citizen’s ability to access government services often depended on whether they spoke the language of the bureaucrat behind the desk. Translation backlogs, forms in unfamiliar scripts and call centres that couldn’t understand you created a friction that excluded hundreds of millions from the digital economy.
In 2022, the government launched Bhashini, an AI-powered translation platform that is rapidly dismantling these barriers. Today, it processes over 300 million translations per month across 35 languages, embedded directly into the digital infrastructure Indians use daily. Unlike commercial tools, Bhashini is designed for public service delivery: a pensioner in Odisha can now file a grievance in Odia without navigating Hindi forms, and a farmer in Punjab can access state agricultural subsidies via voice command. At last year’s Maha Kumbh Mela – a religious gathering of tens of millions – pilgrims used the platform’s AI chatbot in 11 languages to locate lost relatives and access emer
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