Bhashini Partners Maharashtra to Boost Marathi AI Access

The Digital India Bhashini Division, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, held a workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya with the state's Language Department to discuss multilingual and voice-based AI for governance. The session centred on making digital services, government information and citizen applications accessible in *Marathi* and other Indian languages.

Bhashini showcased live demonstrations of speech recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation tools, illustrating how these technologies could simplify citizen interactions with public platforms. Discussions stressed the need for high-quality, representative language datasets, with participants proposing greater involvement of experts and institutions through Bhashini's crowdsourcing initiative, *Bhashadaan*.

The workshop also explored department-specific language AI incorporating specialised government terminology, and introduced the proposed *Mahabhashini* concept, aimed at building a Maharashtra-focused multilingual AI ecosystem for sectors like tourism and transport. Overall, the event reinforced Centre-State cooperation toward an inclusive, multilingual digital governance ecosystem, with Bhashini already powering over 800 government websites and processing millions of daily AI inferences.