How AI is giving Indians the right to learn their own language

India is fundamentally a landscape of voices. According to the 2011 Census, our nation boasts 22 Scheduled Languages and a staggering 1,369 rationalised mother tongues. This breathtaking diversity is our greatest cultural asset. Yet for decades, a silent paradox has lingered beneath the surface. The architecture of our higher education, legal systems, and modern digital economy has rested almost entirely on an English foundation. English is recorded as the mother tongue of just 0.02% of Indians, which is approximately 260,000 people in a nation of 1.4 billion. Even accounting for those who use it as a second or third language, nearly 90% of the country remains outside the English-speaking umbrella. This is not merely an inconvenience. It is a structural injustice that systematically disconnects millions of brilliant minds from the knowledge systems they need to flourish.

The digital age has only sharpened this crisis. According to the Internet in India Report 2024, jointly published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar, 98% of India’s 886 million internet users access content in Indic languages. This report is India’s most comprehensive annual digital survey and covers over 90,000 households across all states. Furthermore, 57% of urban internet users actively prefer regional language content over English. Yet the supply side tells a starkly different story. Data from web-analytics firm W3Techs, analysed by Rest of World, reveals that Hindi accounts for just 0.07% of global web domains, despite being the most spoken language in India. Meanwhile, languages like Bengali and Urdu, each spoken by hundreds of millions, are described as “nearly impossible to find online.” Every year, capable students drift away from technical education. This happens not for lack of intellect, but because the medium of instruction is foreign to them. Millions of citizens cannot access legal rights, welfare schemes, or healthcare information simply because the paperwork is unreadable to them.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 took an honest, courageous step toward solving this by prioritising mother-tongue education. However, policy without a technological engine remains an unfulfilled aspiration. Artificial Intelligence is finally giving us the cognitive infrastructure required to turn this policy into a living reality.

At the Anuvadini Foundation (Anuvadini AI), a Section 8 company under the AICTE, Ministry of Education, Government of India, our focus has been to deploy advanced AI as a public good that restores linguistic dignity at scale. The results are already measurable. Our platform has processed over 150 crore pages through its translation engine. It also maintains a repository of over 870 domain-specific dictionaries to ensure technical and contextual accuracy. Furthermore, we translated more than 700 NCERT textbooks and 721 NIMI skill-development books into regional languages within a span of three months.

This work has been formalized through an active collaboration with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), India’s apex body for school curriculum. This partnership is specifically focused on translating NCERT’s foundational textbooks and learning materials into India’s Scheduled Languages. NCERT’s curriculum serves over 250 million school children. When this content becomes accessible in languages like Odia, Maithili, Santali, and Dogri, the impact is genuinely generational. Our partnership with NCERT represents precisely what NEP 2020 envisioned. It is not just a policy aspiration sitting in a gazette notification, but a working technological pipeline delivering mother-tongue education to classrooms today.

To dismantle an institutional barrier, technology must operate at a systemic scale. Our bulk-translation tool Bujji, which translates directly within formats like InDesign, CorelDraw, PPT, Photoshop, etc, demonstrates this by rendering thousands of pages of complex engineering, medical, and legal texts into regional languages without losing formatting or contextual meaning. In Kerala, over 5,136 district court judgments have been translated into Malayalam. This makes justice readable in the language of the people it serves. Our real-time multilingual translation and transcription tool redefines communication further. It accepts spoken regional dialects for up to 47 minutes and delivers instant contextual translation, enabling seamless interaction between citizens and institutions across linguistic divides.

Anuvadini AI has translated the websites of Shri Ram Janmabhoomi, Incredible India, and Rashtrapati Bhawan. The scope of Anuvadini AI’s institutional partnerships continues to expand. A recent Memorandum of Understanding with the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS), Ministry of Ayush, focuses on translating research publications, the CCRAS Bulletin, and Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) materials into 13 regional languages. This ensures that authentic, research-backed Ayurveda knowledge reaches citizens in their native tongue and reduces the spread of misinformation in the health space.

Technology must also address digital sovereignty. As hundreds of millions of regional language speakers enter the digital space, they require secure, encrypted frameworks that protect their privacy. Our platform, Hyped Samvadini, a super global communication app, embeds multilingual translation directly into a SIM-binding, end-to-end encrypted messaging environment. This protects vulnerable populations, particularly women and senior citizens, from identity theft and financial fraud while enabling natural communication in their mother tongue.

National competitive examinations, including JEE, NEET, and CUET, are now increasingly available in regional languages through our infrastructure. This ensures that students are judged on their mastery of the subject, not their command of English. These are not isolated applications. They are the building blocks of an inclusive knowledge society, one where technology functions as a public utility rather than a corporate product.

The transformation is no longer a distant projection. It is visible today in the engineering colleges of Odisha, the courtrooms of Kerala, and the school classrooms where a child is reading an NCERT textbook in the language their mother speaks at home. India has always spoken in many voices. By deploying AI as an equaliser, we are finally building institutions with the capacity to listen to all of them.

The writer is the CEO of the Anuvadini Foundation and the CCO of the AICTE, Ministry of Education, Government of India.

The writer is the CEO of the Anuvadini Foundation and the CCO of the AICTE, Ministry of Education, Government of India; Views presented are personal.