bharatSetu: a 1M x 22 bridge for indic translation
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.
