Digital India BHASHINI Division, RBI sign MOU for bringing multilingual access to banking

Mumbai: With a mission to have multilingual access to banking and financial services and promote financial inclusion across India’s diverse linguistic landscape, the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD), under the Digital India Corporation (DIC), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has inked a deal.

The initiative seeks to strengthen multilingual access across all 22 languages recognised under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India.

The initiative is titled -  “BHASHINI for Seva / Sanchalan – A BHASHINI Sahayogi Program”.

The MoU provides for deploying BHASHINI models within RBI’s ecosystem, co-developing a banking-specific language model tailored to financial terminology, and enriching linguistic datasets through the “Bhashadaan” initiative, according to a press statement.

The two entities will jointly develop a domain-specific language model tailored for the banking sector to be known as “Banking BHASHINI,” incorporating banking terminology, regulatory frameworks, and sector-specific use cases. The proposed model will deliver strong contextual accuracy across multiple languages and support the creation of reference applications and voice-enabled interfaces.

The collaboration also includes enriching linguistic datasets through the “Bhashadaan” initiative, enabling structured contributions to enhance the performance and scalability of multilingual AI systems for institutional use. These efforts will be undertaken under the broader BHASHINI Sahayogi framework, ensuring continuous improvement and adaptability of AI models to evolving financial sector needs.

This strategic partnership underscores the Reserve Bank of India’s commitment to leveraging indigenous AI capabilities and reinforces the role of BHASHINI as India’s national-scale Language Infrastructure. Together, they aim to build secure, interoperable, and inclusive multilingual AI systems for critical governance and institutional domains, with a special focus on advancing financial services accessibility for all citizens.