India's Parliament Embraces AI: Lok Sabha and MeitY Launch 'Sansad Bhashini' for Multilingual Operations

Lok Sabha, MeitY Sign MoU to Launch 'Sansad Bhashini' for AI-Powered Multilingual Parliamentary Operations

Sansad will provide its corpus of legislative records for training and refining these AI solutions, while Bhashini will contribute translation capabilities and technical expertise. The Lok Sabha Secretariat and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop Sansad Bhashini, AI-driven in-house solutions to streamline parliamentary operations in multilingual languages. The signing took place in the presence of Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and Union Minister for MeitY Ashwini Vaishnaw, as reported by PTI. Sansad will provide its corpus of legislative records for training and fine-tuning these AI solutions, while Bhashini will contribute translation capabilities and technical expertise. The initiative will integrate AI tools with parliamentary data, enabling seamless access to historical debates and legislative records in multiple languages. Parliamentary resources provided by Sansad will be used to train and fine-tune AI tools, while Bhashini will contribute translation capabilities and technical expertise. As part of Sansad Bhashini, AI-powered solutions will include real-time translation of legacy debate documents, agenda files, and committee meetings into regional languages, ensuring greater accessibility. A smart chatbot for the Parliament website will assist members and officials in retrieving procedural rules and documents, offering instant, accurate responses and improving efficiency over time. Additionally, an advanced speech-to-text system will transcribe parliamentary debates in real-time, reducing documentation challenges and ensuring easy reference. The initiative will also introduce speech-to-speech conversion with live translation, allowing immediate multilingual access to discussions and debates, along with automatic summarisation for faster decision-making. Vaishnaw thanked Lok Sabha Speaker Shri Om Birla for his leadership, expressing confidence that Sansad Bhashini would revolutionise parliamentary processes through AI, enhancing multilingual accessibility and strengthening India's tech-driven governance. The signing ceremony was attended by Shri Utpal Kumar Singh, Secretary-General of Lok Sabha, and Shri Gaurav Goyal, Joint Secretary of the Lok Sabha Secretariat, who signed the MoU on behalf of the Secretariat. In January, ahead of the Panchayat to Parliament 2.0 event, Om Birla conducted a live demonstration of the Sansad-Bhashini Speech-to-Speech translation system. The test, carried out in collaboration with the Bhashini team, included the participation of women representatives from Panchayats. The government's AI-powered language translation platform, Bhashini, is also translating the daily agenda papers of the Parliament into 10 regional languages. The team has already translated around 1,000 debates into Hindi and English by digitising 18,000 hours of speech data. Amitabh Nag, the CEO of Bhashini, said in a post that this is the beginning of a historic co-creation journey with Indian Parliament for Sansad-Bhashini.

AI Makes Way To The Parliament: MeitY, Lok Sabha Secretariat Partner To Build Sansad Bhashini

Translation capabilities and other technical expertise will be contributed by the government's AI-powered language translation platform, Bhashini In a bid to better democratise parliamentary operations, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Lok Sabha secretariat have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to develop an AI-powered solution, the Sansad Bhashini. In a statement, the central government said that the initiative will provide comprehensive in-house AI solutions in the parliament to streamline parliamentary operations as well as offer multilingual support. Sansad Bhashini will see the two aforementioned government entities leverage parliamentary data and resources to develop AI tools. Meanwhile, translation capabilities and other technical expertise will be contributed by the government's AI-powered language translation platform, Bhashini. Key features of the Sansad Bhashni are as follows: "The "Sansad Bhashini" initiative is proving useful for smooth functioning of Parliament related work and for making proceedings available to Hon'ble Members in multiple languages simultaneously. This will enable our Hon'ble Members of Parliament, researchers and academia to easily access translation of Parliament debates in any language," Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla said in a post on X. Interestingly, the launch comes a couple of days later from PM Narendra Modi's appearance on a podcast with Lex Friedman. The podcast, which featured Modi converse in Hindi while Friedman spoke in English, was converted to English and Hindi using ElevenLabs' natural-sounding speech synthesis software using deep learning. Amid rising adoption of GenAI across the globe, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that India's youth and talent pool is the country's biggest asset and will drive the progress of AI. "Without genuine human intelligence, AI can't thrive or progress sustainably, and that real intelligence exists abundantly in India's youth and talent pool, and I believe that's our greatest asset," Modi said during the podcast. The Centre has been a proponent of promoting AI adoption within the country. Last year, the government launched the IndiaAI Mission to build a high-end scalable AI computing ecosystem with a capacity of 10,000 or more GPUs via public-private partnerships. This initiative includes an AI marketplace designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to AI innovators. To foster private-public partnership in the emerging space, MeitY invited applications from Indian startups and enterprises for building an India-specific AI foundational model under the government's flagship INR 10,370 Cr IndiaAI Mission. At the end of February, the center had released at least 67 proposals for building the indigenously-designed and developed AI foundational model.