@BHARAT
India has launched an audacious project to democratise its digital economy by enabling an Internet in local languages. EPISODE #81
Dear Reader,
A very Happy Monday to you.
Last week the country celebrated the seventh anniversary of Digital India, a project launched on 1 July, 2015 to use technology to enable equitable access to basic services like education and health care, while simultaneously ensuring transparency and accountability.
The significance of this anniversary was not just about recording the impressive successes like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT), CoWIN, Goods and Services Tax, ONDC and the ‘One Nation, One PDS’.
Instead it is about the rollout of Bhashini—an ambitious project which proposes to enable access to Internet and digital services in local languages. The intent is to overcome the handicap of lack of proficiency in English. And once again—like in the case of UPI, CoWin, ONDC—this will be done using public digital assets.
This language technology platform will be built by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. Both in scale and scope this project is staggering. Especially at a time when India is poised to bring its next 500 million people online. In short India is democratising Internet use.
So this week I explore this initiative of building an Internet for local languages—officially India recognises 22 languages, though people converse in about 350 dialects. Do read and share your feedback.
The cover picture for this week is sourced from Unsplash and taken Claudette Blejjenberg.
A big shoutout to Deepak, Gautam, Premasundaran, Aashish, Rahul and Vandana for your informed responses, kind appreciation and amplification of last week’s column. Gratitude also to all those who responded on Twitter and Linkedin. Reader participation and amplification is key to growing this newsletter community. And, many thanks to readers who hit the like button😊.
DIGITAL LANGUAGE DIVIDE
Last week India celebrated the seventh anniversary of the Digital India initiative launched in 2015. It was a good moment to do a stock taking of the impressive distance the country has traversed in this period with its version of the digital economy. To be sure some of the digital initiatives predate the Digital India programme.
Regardless the list of impressive projects include Unified Payments Interface (UPI) (averaging 5 billion-plus transactions a month), Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) to enable targeted welfare spending (generating a cumulative savings of Rs 2.28 lakh crore at the end of March 2021), CoWIN (which enabled nearly 2 billion covid-19 jabs seamlessly), Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and the ‘One Nation, One PDS (public distribution system)’.
India added another audacious project to this impressive list of digital economy initiatives with the launch of Bhashini (if you wish to access the official site please click this link) last week.
The intent is to democratise use of the Internet in India by allowing people to access in regional languages—officially India recognises 22 languages, though people speak in 350 dialects. At the moment the access is mostly in English, though there are a few start-ups catering to regional language preferences.
Officially the union government summed up the effort thus:
“The Bhashini platform is a unified language interface of India languages.
It will enable citizens from different regions, speaking different languages to interact with the government and to use different govt. scheme with ease.”
This democratised access will be made available both in text and voice.
English Vinglish
For more than a decade after the Internet took wings, English was the primary language of access. However, by the turn of the Millennium access to the Internet was enabled in other languages and gradually the hegemony of English was eroded.
The graphic makes clear that English is still the single most used language of the Internet. However Chinese is a close second and Spanish, Arabic a distant third and fourth, respectively. No Indian language makes the list of top 10.
The political economy of this is obvious: proficiency in English determines the scale of access to the Internet in India, further worsening the existing digital divide. By enabling access in various languages therefore the Internet will be democratised.
In fact, survey data included in the White Paper published by the government on Bhashini reveals that 53% of those surveyed maintained that they would use the Internet if the content was made available in local languages.
This idea to implement Bhashini in India was first proposed by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Union Budget for 2021-22.
“We will undertake a new initiative – National Language Translation Mission (NTLM). This will enable the wealth of governance-and-policy related knowledge on the Internet being made available in major Indian languages.”
Since then NTLM has acquired the moniker Bhashini.
Yes, India’s plan is extremely ambitious given the array of regional languages. I would say it is audacious—like the launch of UPI using an open digital ecosystem. But it has legs.
Not just because of the country’s proven record given the spectacular success of India’s recent digital initiatives. But also because of the ongoing programme to connect the entire country on an optical fibre network—which will dramatically shrink the digital divide in terms of physical access. Together they mean good news for this democratisation project.
Digitising Bharat
The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) to enable broadband connectivity to rural India was birthed on 25 October 2011 under the leadership of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.
Unfortunately, the otherwise brilliant idea, was dead on arrival. In the three years after launch only 5,000 gram panchayats were brought on the optic fibre grid. Worse villagers failed to derive the benefit of their village being on the broadband grid.
A post-mortem by a high-level committee in 2015 uncovered the structural flaws in the existing plan:
Last-mile connectivity to households was not part of the initial ask;
WiFi hotspots had to be generated in villages;
State governments were not stakeholders;
Right of way issues disrupted laying of cables.
The union government, which by now was under the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance, acted on the recommendations.
As the graphic shows the pace did pick up, but nowhere near the desired levels. Part of the reason was the onset of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. So far of the 262,825 gram panchayats in the country, as on 1 July, only 181,216 were part of the optical fibre network.
The good news is that there is a definite acceleration in the roll-out of the fibre network. But the bad news is that the project is way behind schedule. Hopefully if the current pace is sustained then all of rural India should be on the optic fibre grid in the next two years. Around the same time Bhashini will catch steam.
Convergence
Connecting the dots—the gradual expansion of the fibre optic footprint to rural areas and the productionising of Bhashini—you find reason to believe that India has a good chance to succeed in its plan to democratise the Internet.
One reason is that the technologies powering speech recognition, machine translation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are witnessing exponential improvement with the application of Artificial Intelligence. However to leverage this technology India needs access to multilingual datasets.
Accordingly, the first phase of Bhashini, is proposing to crowdsource language inputs under the Bhasha Daan programme with the campaign slogan of ‘Bolo, Suno, Likho’ (Speak, Listen, Write). This will be sifted using deep tech to create an open source repository that could be accessed by anyone.
Alongside the strategy will have to develop the guardrails on processing and protecting the vast amounts of data that will be fed into a public repository. The easy part was to unveil the blueprint. The more difficult task is to follow through with the heavy lifting—not just by the government but by all stakeholders, including citizens.
If successful India would have turned the maxim, ‘Information is Power’, on its head. Like what UPI has done to the business of payments.
Recommended Viewing
Last week the Ministry of Finance hosted the first annual ‘Arun Jaitley Memorial Lecture’ in New Delhi.
The keynote address was delivered by Tharman Shanmugaratnam, former deputy Prime Minister and now the senior minister in the government of Singapore. The theme of this year’s lecture was ‘Growth through Inclusivity, Inclusivity through Growth’.
The lecture by the erudite minister was brilliant. It is a must watch. I am sharing a few teasers below.
First, Shanmugaratnam, in his very forthright style, sets out the unprecedented challenges facing the world,
“We have entered an era of profound global fragility. In fact, we have a confluence of fragilities; a confluence of insecurities: geopolitical, existential, economic and social. (All happening) at the same time.”
After setting the context, the minister then went on to argue that the bigger threat from an extended period of high inflation and slow growth was not economic hardship.
“The levels of inflation and slow growth for a while do not constitute the most important problem in the world.
Critically it will erode political capital at a time when we need it within nations and globally to address much larger challenges—including the challenge of climate change crisis and shrinking biodiversity.”
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Till we meet again next week. Stay safe.
As always very well written Anil, so much knowledge to gain from your writings.
It was reported yesterday that the a Department of the UN has said that India have the highest population in the world from next year, upto 2100. For this capital of human resource to become a catalyst for a higher growth trajectory of the Indian economy, the government needs to empower them. The move to have internet in local languages, is a giant step in the right direction. When the whole nation starts moving on well oiled wheels, the success story of India's future is assured. This will give a tremendous boost to employment and increase in per capita income. Out of the box thinking and it is a continuing process. Great information and an excellent piece to read. Thanks for sharing the video. Look forward to next Monday Anil.