The Ministry of Minority Affairs on Tuesday hosted a BhashaDaan workshop under BHASHINI, India’s National Language Technology Mission, with a focus on preserving classical and endangered languages through the use of technology. The workshop brought together experts, institutional stakeholders and community representatives to discuss strategies for safeguarding India’s linguistic heritage in the digital age.
Special emphasis was laid on languages such as Pali, Prakrit, Avesta Pahlavi and the Gurmukhi script, underlining the need to develop high-quality monolingual corpora and promote community-led data contributions. Secretary, Ministry of Minority Affairs, Dr Chandra Shekhar Kumar, highlighted the importance of learning, documenting and preserving classical and endangered languages through the effective use of artificial intelligence.
BHASHINI, an AI-powered platform led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, aims to break language barriers by enabling real-time text and speech translation and ensuring access to digital services in citizens’ own languages.
During the workshop, participants were introduced to the BhashaDaan ecosystem and its role in supporting low-resource and classical languages. Live demonstrations of Bolo India, Suno India, Likho India and Dekho India showcased how citizens can contribute speech, text and image data to strengthen AI language models.
