New Delhi, Jan 6 (IANS) The second day of the Human Capital Working Group Meeting in Guwahati concluded on Tuesday with detailed discussions on how artificial intelligence can be practically implemented to improve language access, education and digital inclusion across India.
The two-day meeting was organised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the IndiaAI Mission, in collaboration with the Assam Government and IIT Guwahati.
The day began with a session on the architecture of the National Language Translation Mission.
Speaking at the session, Mitesh Khapre from IIT Madras, who also heads AI4Bharat, explained how the mission has evolved over the past four years.
“The initiative aims to build core AI and language technologies that reflect India’s vast linguistic diversity,” he said.
Khapre noted that the mission focuses on the 22 constitutionally recognised Indian languages, which together cover nearly 99 per cent of the country’s population.
Another key session focused on language technology development in the Northeast.
Rohit Sinha from IIT Guwahati highlighted the region’s unique linguistic richness, pointing out that the Northeast is home to nearly 200 languages despite having a small share of India’s population.
He said the Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology at IIT Guwahati is supporting government-led language missions through local data collection, native-speaker participation and the development of tools such as machine translation, speech recognition and text-to-speech systems.
By focusing on low-resource languages like Assamese and Mizo, the Centre is helping improve access to education, governance and digital services.
The BHASHINI platform also featured prominently in the discussions. Jyotismita Devi from the Digital India BHASHINI Division explained that the initiative aims to make digital platforms more accessible through voice-based and language-inclusive technologies.
She said BHASHINI allows citizens to interact with government services and digital platforms in their own languages, even if they have limited literacy or internet skills.
The final session of the day focused on AI education and was led by Amit Awekar from IIT Guwahati.
Addressing students, he spoke about using a reverse engineering approach to teach AI.
--IANS
pk
