Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Kathmandu University's Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure & Artificial Intelligence (DPI-AI), Nepal, to jointly advance Language AI, multilingual digital public infrastructure, and inclusive digital ecosystems across India and Nepal. The agreement was formalised on 7 June in the presence of External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar and Shishir Khanal, Nepal's Minister of Foreign Affairs, signalling strong bilateral commitment to technology-driven inclusion.

What the MoU Covers

Under the partnership, the two institutions will collaborate on developing high-quality Nepali language datasets, speech corpora, and multilingual AI resources — including speech-to-text, text-to-speech, machine translation, and multilingual conversational AI capabilities. The collaboration also targets the preservation and digitisation of linguistic and literary heritage of low-resource and underrepresented languages across the India-Nepal region, ensuring communities at risk of digital extinction gain access to AI-enabled tools in their mother tongue.

What BHASHINI's Open DPI Model Means for South Asia

Amitabh Nag, CEO of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, said the open Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) model has the potential to transform digital access for millions of citizens across South Asia. According to Nag, the collaboration will 'extend that vision beyond India's borders, strengthening our shared linguistic and cultural heritage while building the next generation of multilingual AI for the Global South.' This marks one of BHASHINI's first formal cross-border institutional partnerships since the platform's national rollout.

Nepal's Perspective

Professor Bal Krishna Bal, Associate Dean at Kathmandu University, described the MoU as reflecting 'a shared commitment between Nepal and India to harness the power of artificial intelligence for linguistic inclusion and social impact.' He emphasised that the initiative goes beyond a technology collaboration — it is envisioned as a framework to strengthen people-to-people connections, preserve linguistic heritage, and enable equitable access to opportunities by overcoming language, literacy, and digital barriers across the region.

Broader Significance

This comes amid growing global momentum around open DPI frameworks, with India having championed the model through UPI, Aadhaar, and DigiLocker at international forums including the G20. Notably, the BHASHINI-Nepal partnership extends that DPI philosophy into the linguistic domain — a space where South Asia's extraordinary diversity of languages has historically been a barrier to digital inclusion. With hundreds of millions of people in the region communicating primarily in languages that lack robust digital tools, the stakes for this collaboration are considerable.