Bhashini and NCERT's AI Pipeline Translates India's National Textbooks Into 22 Languages

Bhashini is an AI-driven language-technology platform launched by India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in July 2022 under the National Language Translation Mission, offering machine translation, speech recognition and text-to-speech across India's 22 scheduled languages. NCERT's Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET) runs a dedicated Translation Cell applying AI-assisted translation to national textbooks, teacher-training materials and policy documents.

The stated policy driver is India's National Education Policy 2020, which calls for instruction in a child's home or regional language through at least Grade 5, and ideally Grade 8 — a goal that is logistically very difficult without machine-assisted translation given India's linguistic diversity.

NCERT-CIET's Translation Cell renders national textbooks, teacher-training materials and policy documents out of Hindi/English into regional languages such as Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Odia and Assamese. Separately, India's higher-education regulators AICTE and UGC use a related tool, Anuvaadini, to machine-translate undergraduate and postgraduate technical textbooks, published on the government's e-KUMBH portal.

Available public sources describe the scale of the translation infrastructure and its policy rationale, but do not provide an independent, learning-outcome evaluation of AI-translated textbook content; machine translation of technical and culturally specific content into low-resource Indian languages is acknowledged in NLTM's own materials as an ongoing quality challenge requiring human review.