BHASHINI is India's national language technology platform, built under the National Language Translation Mission and launched by the Prime Minister on 4 July 2022 during Digital India Week at Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It works as a set of application programming interfaces - machine translation, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech and optical character recognition - that any government department, startup or developer can call rather than building language models from scratch. The design goal is voice-first access: a citizen who cannot type in English, or cannot type at all, should still be able to use a digital public service. The platform is run by the Digital India BHASHINI Division, an independent business division of the Digital India Corporation under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and covers the scheduled languages of India. Because Nepali is one of the 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, the models built for domestic use transfer directly to a Nepali-speaking audience, which is the practical basis for taking the platform to Kathmandu.

India has increasingly exported its digital public infrastructure as a foreign-policy instrument rather than selling it as a product - UPI acceptance abroad, the India Stack modules adopted by partner governments, and now language AI. Nepal is a natural first case: a shared script, a language already covered by Indian models, and a small developer ecosystem that gains more from an open API than from building its own. The Kathmandu programme paired a developer-facing session with an institutional MoU involving a university centre, which is the standard pattern for these engagements - train the users, then anchor the relationship in a local institution so it survives beyond the visit. For examination purposes the point to hold on to is that BHASHINI is classified as digital public infrastructure alongside Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker, not as a standalone research project.