Gangtok, Aug 19: The Government of Sikkim has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Digital India BHASHINI Division under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to make government services available to citizens in their own languages, marking the State’s entry into the Centre’s push for multilingual digital governance.
The MoU was signed on Wednesday during a one-day BHASHINI Rajyam State Engagement Workshop held at a hotel in Gangtok, organised jointly by the Department of Information Technology, Government of Sikkim, and the Digital India BHASHINI Division. The workshop brought together government officials and language experts to discuss adopting Indian language technologies in governance, citizen services, research and innovation.
The inaugural session was attended by Chairman of the Department of IT, Navraj Gurung, as chief guest, alongside Secretary of the Department of IT Bimal Rai, Principal Director T Samdup, CEO of the Digital India BHASHINI Division Amitabh Nag, and Director Prem Vijay Basnet.
Gurung called the partnership a chance for Sikkim to join India’s digital transformation while protecting its linguistic identity, saying technology should communicate with citizens in their own languages rather than the other way around. He pointed to rural and remote areas, where language barriers often make it harder for people to access government services, as a key area the initiative could help, and urged the State’s youth to support the preservation of Sikkim’s languages alongside the technology push.
Rai said language had remained a persistent gap in the State’s digital governance efforts despite steady progress in bringing services online. He said the partnership with BHASHINI would initially cover Nepali, Bhutia and Lepcha, with the State working alongside the BHASHINI team to make official communications, forms and eventually public services available in these languages. He called on departments that interact directly with citizens, including Health, Education, Agriculture, Rural Development and Urban Development, to actively take part and ensure relevant information reaches people in languages they understand, describing the MoU as a commitment that citizens’ own languages have a place in their own government.
Nag spoke about the role of artificial intelligence and language technology in removing language as a barrier to digital access. He demonstrated the BHASHINI platform by delivering part of his address in English while the application generated a live translation into Nepali, giving participants a firsthand look at the platform’s capabilities and its current limitations. He pointed to Sikkim’s strengths in tourism, organic farming, pharmaceuticals, clean energy and culture as areas that could benefit from the technology, and said farmers, tourists and citizens should each be able to engage without needing English. He also encouraged the State’s startups and innovators to build solutions on the BHASHINI platform rather than simply use it, and called on communities to contribute to strengthening the underlying language models.
Basnet said the workshop had been close to a year in the making and that the MoU marked a milestone, though the real work now lay in implementation. He said Sikkim would take a phased approach, starting with a limited number of services in Nepali, Bhutia and Lepcha, with a dedicated Department of IT team working alongside BHASHINI experts to train and build capacity among officials. He stressed that translation quality and accuracy would be closely monitored given the sensitivity of local languages, with services tested on real users before rollout and refined based on feedback.
In his welcome address, Samdup highlighted Sikkim’s linguistic diversity and said the BHASHINI partnership would help close the language gap in government services, particularly for people in rural and remote areas, by making portals, forms and e-services available in local languages.
The technical sessions covered the BHASHINI Udyat initiative, including the National Hub for Language Technology, its architecture, APIs and integration options, along with ARPAN, BHASHINI’s service layer covering translation, transcription, and speech-to-speech and video translation tools. Further sessions introduced BHASHINI App Mitra, BHASHINI Mitra and BHASHINI Pravakta, covering use cases in education, banking, governance and entrepreneurship, along with opportunities in hackathons, research and startup engagement, and ways to expand citizen participation in building regional language datasets.
The programme closed with an open discussion on practical use cases and a “low-hanging fruit” approach to identifying near-term areas for adoption, followed by a vote of thanks from Joint Director Ashim Tamang. Officials from various State departments and language experts from the Education Department attended the workshop.
Courtesy IPRGOS
