bharatSetu: a 1M x 22 bridge for indic translation
Haq Nawaz Malik, Nahfid Nissar, Faizan Iqbal
Abstract
India's Eighth Schedule recognises 22 languages, yet parallel data is uneven across them, and many language pairs, especially among lower-resource languages such as Bodo, Dogri, Santali and Kashmiri, lack direct bitext. We present BharatSetu 22-Indic 1M, a row-aligned table of 984,764 English sentences, each paired with machine translations into all 22 scheduled languages (21,664,808 Indic cells), generated with the sarvamai/sarvam-translate model family. Because every Indic cell in a row translates the same English sentence, any two columns form a translation pair: 462 directed Indic-to-Indic pairs, or 506 including English, without direct bitext. We call these pivot-derived pairs and propose a confidence layer that lets users choose how strictly each pair is connected. The corpus is machine-generated and not human-verified; quality is expected to vary by language, domain and sentence style, and pivot-derived pairs can inherit errors from both sides. We therefore release BharatSetu as a machine layer and propose a human-correction layer keyed to the same row identifiers, so that each corrected column upgrades every pair that uses it, together with an evaluation protocol. We report no translation-quality results.