MeitY, IndiaAI Conclude Day 2 of Human Capital Meeting

07 Jan 2026 CW Team

The day began with a session on the architecture of NLTM, led by Mitesh Khapre, Head, AI4Bharat, IIT Madras. He traced the evolution of the mission over the past four years and outlined its objective of developing foundational AI and language technologies for India’s linguistic diversity. He noted that NLTM prioritises 22 constitutionally recognised languages, covering nearly 99% of the population, while addressing the challenges posed by the dominance of English-centric AI systems globally.

Rohit Sinha, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology, IIT Guwahati, spoke on language technology development in the Northeast. He highlighted the region’s linguistic richness, with nearly 200 languages, and detailed efforts to support low-resource and non-scheduled languages such as Assamese and Mizo through data collection, native-speaker annotation, and the development of machine translation, OCR, speech recognition, and text-to-speech systems.

Jyotismita Devi, Engagement Manager – Northeast India, Digital India BHASHINI Division, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, presented an overview of the BHASHINI initiative. She outlined its vision of voice-first, inclusive language technologies that enable citizens to access digital services in their native languages through open APIs, datasets, and quality standards.

The final session on AI education was led by Amit Awekar, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Guwahati, who discussed a reverse engineering approach to developing deeper system-level understanding and ethical AI capabilities among students.

The meeting concluded with remarks by Sanasam Ranbir Singh, Professor and Head, Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology, IIT Guwahati. The Guwahati deliberations are seen as a key precursor to the India AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled in New Delhi from February 15–20, 2026.

The second day of the Human Capital Working Group Meeting, organised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the IndiaAI Mission in collaboration with the Government of Assam and IIT Guwahati, concluded with in-depth discussions on implementation pathways for language access, the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM), AI-enabled education, and the BHASHINI platform.The day began with a session on the architecture of NLTM, led by Mitesh Khapre, Head, AI4Bharat, IIT Madras. He traced the evolution of the mission over the past four years and outlined its objective of developing foundational AI and language technologies for India’s linguistic diversity. He noted that NLTM prioritises 22 constitutionally recognised languages, covering nearly 99% of the population, while addressing the challenges posed by the dominance of English-centric AI systems globally.Rohit Sinha, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology, IIT Guwahati, spoke on language technology development in the Northeast. He highlighted the region’s linguistic richness, with nearly 200 languages, and detailed efforts to support low-resource and non-scheduled languages such as Assamese and Mizo through data collection, native-speaker annotation, and the development of machine translation, OCR, speech recognition, and text-to-speech systems.Jyotismita Devi, Engagement Manager – Northeast India, Digital India BHASHINI Division, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, presented an overview of the BHASHINI initiative. She outlined its vision of voice-first, inclusive language technologies that enable citizens to access digital services in their native languages through open APIs, datasets, and quality standards.The final session on AI education was led by Amit Awekar, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Guwahati, who discussed a reverse engineering approach to developing deeper system-level understanding and ethical AI capabilities among students.The meeting concluded with remarks by Sanasam Ranbir Singh, Professor and Head, Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology, IIT Guwahati. The Guwahati deliberations are seen as a key precursor to the India AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled in New Delhi from February 15–20, 2026.

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