NEW DELHI: In a significant step towards strengthening multilingual digital healthcare delivery, Union Ayush Ministry has inked a pact with the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to accelerate the transcription, translation and dissemination of Ayush knowledge systems across Indian languages using advanced artificial intelligence-driven language technologies.
The collaboration, launched under the initiative “BHASHINI Rajyam – A BHASHINI Sahayogi Program”, seeks to integrate the BHASHINI platform — India’s National Language Digital Public Infrastructure — with a wide range of digital platforms and services developed by the Ayush Ministry.
The partnership assumes significance as the Ministry, through the Ayush Grid initiative, has been working towards digitisation across healthcare delivery, medical education, research, drug administration and citizen services.
“As part of the collaboration, portals, applications and AI-enabled systems developed under Ayush Grid are proposed to be made accessible in all 22 scheduled languages recognised under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, thereby widening public outreach and ensuring linguistic inclusivity,” said officials from the Ayush Ministry.
They said the collaboration would integrate BHASHINI’s multilingual AI capabilities across Ayush digital ecosystems, including Ayush Grid portals, mobile applications and AI-driven healthcare tools.
“The initiative will also focus on the creation of domain-specific multilingual terminology systems, strengthening Ayush language datasets and developing contextual AI models for communication related to Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa and Homoeopathy.”
The MoU was signed by Dr. Subodh Kumar, Director, Ministry of Ayush, and Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, in the presence of Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha and Dr. Kavita Jain, respectively Secretary, and Joint Secretary, Ayush Ministry.
Highlighting the importance of democratising traditional medical knowledge through language accessibility, Kotecha said Ayush systems embody “immense civilisational knowledge and cultural depth” and that making them available in every Indian language was essential for inclusive healthcare delivery and public outreach.
“Through this collaboration with BHASHINI, we aim to strengthen multilingual capabilities across the Ayush ecosystem, develop robust domain-specific terminologies, and build future-ready AI systems that can support citizens seamlessly across linguistic boundaries,” he said.
Dr. Kavita Jain underscored the transformative potential of multilingual AI solutions in improving healthcare accessibility at the grassroots level. Referring to demonstrations conducted during the interaction, she said technologies enabling doctor-patient interaction through multilingual speech interfaces and automated prescription generation could significantly strengthen citizen-centric healthcare delivery.
“This collaboration represents an important step towards building more inclusive and accessible digital healthcare ecosystems,” she said.
Amitabh Nag said language-inclusive AI systems were critical to ensuring equitable access to digital public services. “Through this collaboration with the Ministry of Ayush, we aim to build multilingual and voice-enabled healthcare ecosystems capable of supporting citizens in their preferred languages while strengthening India’s larger Digital Public Infrastructure vision,” he said.
Ayush Grid Officer on Special Duty Naman Goyal said the Yoga Portal and the Ayush Grid master portal, MAISP, had already integrated versions of the BHASHINI plugin and received encouraging feedback from users accessing services in local languages. Following the signing of the MoU, he said, all portals under the Ayush Grid ecosystem would gradually be onboarded onto BHASHINI to enable seamless access to Ayush services across regions and linguistic groups.
The initiative will facilitate the integration of BHASHINI translation APIs, speech recognition systems and voice technologies into Ayush digital platforms to improve citizen engagement and accessibility. Discussions also explored leveraging the NAMASTE Portal — India’s digital repository for standardised Ayush terminologies — for glossary-building and future multilingual AI model development in healthcare, said the officials.
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