The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) to expand access to its services in regional Indian languages, the regulator said in a press release on Tuesday, November 3.
Source: SEBI press release via NewKerala
The agreement was signed in New Delhi by Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of DIBD, and Sandip Pradhan, Whole Time Member of SEBI, in the presence of senior officials from both organisations. SEBI said the partnership "comes into force from today," establishing a formal framework for technological integration between the capital markets regulator and the government language-technology division.
What the pact covers
Under the MoU, SEBI will leverage BHASHINI's language translation APIs, models and tools — including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Machine Translation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — to facilitate access to SEBI's services in regional Indian languages, Live Law reported.
Source: Live Law Biz
The flow of expertise runs both ways: the partnership will also help enhance BHASHINI's language models with securities-market-related terminology, so that market documents and investor material can be rendered more accurately in Indian languages.
DIBD is an independent division functioning under the Digital India Corporation, a Section 8 not-for-profit company established by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
Most first-time Indian investors are more comfortable in a regional language than in English. If SEBI's circulars, investor charters and grievance channels work in the language an investor actually reads and speaks, the regulator's protections reach far beyond the English-speaking metro investor.