How IIM Udaipur is scaling its bilingual curriculum with Sarvam
“Our learners should not have to carry the cost of imperfect AI. When an early tool translated ‘Bachelor’ as ‘अविवाहित’, it reminded us that literal translation is not the same as understanding. Sarvam gave us the strongest path we found for working with the colloquial, code-mixed Hindi of a real classroom while preserving the faculty member's voice and timing, so we could record in Hindi first and extend access in English without asking faculty to teach every lecture twice.”
Prof. Kunal Kamal Kumar
Chairperson, BBA Program, IIM Udaipur
Background
IIM Udaipur is a public management institution. In July 2026, it launched the first cohort of its four-year, online and flexible BBA program, designed to make management education accessible to learners across different locations and circumstances.
Language is an important part of that design. The first three years of the program are bilingual, and learners can complete the three-year BBA in Hindi. The optional Honours year is taught in English with transition support for learners. Across the program, students complete 40 core courses and achieve an academic milestone at the end of each year.
For IIM Udaipur, making the program bilingual was not simply about translating course material after it had been created. It meant designing a way for faculty to teach naturally in Hindi while making the same teaching available to learners who prefer English.
The Problem
A management lecture is difficult to translate well because it rarely stays within one language.
Faculty may teach primarily in Hindi while using English business terminology, switching languages within a sentence, referring to names and technical terms, and explaining concepts conversationally. A useful English version therefore needs to preserve more than the words. It needs to retain the academic meaning, the flow of the lecture, and the faculty member's voice and teaching style.
Early trials showed how easily that context could be lost. In one instance, “Bachelor” in “Bachelor of Business Administration” was translated as “अविवाहित”, meaning an unmarried person. The translation was linguistically valid, but completely wrong for the context. Other platforms also struggled with colloquial Hindi, code-switching, pronunciation and English terminology within Hindi speech.
The alternative was to record the curriculum twice, once in Hindi and again in English. That would mean repeating faculty preparation, studio sessions, retakes and production for every lecture. At the scale of an entire degree program, bilingual delivery would effectively require a second content production operation.
IIM Udaipur needed a way to start with one faculty recording and turn it into two dependable language experiences.
Why Sarvam
IIM Udaipur evaluated Sarvam alongside other competitors and conventional human dubbing. Rather than testing standard demos, the team evaluated platforms using the kind of colloquial Hindi and bilingual business vocabulary that appears in an actual classroom.
Sarvam produced the most usable starting point for this use case, with the quickest turnaround time.
Its handling of colloquial and code-mixed Hindi was stronger in IIM Udaipur's trials, while the dubbed output better preserved the speaker's identity, tone, pacing and timing. The team could also review and edit transcripts and translations before synthesis, allowing academic terminology, names and contextual meaning to be checked before a lecture reached learners.
That control was important. The objective was not to remove academic review, but to make it possible for faculty and academic teams to focus their time on meaning and quality rather than recreating an entire lecture in another language.
The Solution
The workflow begins with faculty teaching naturally in Hindi.
Sarvam transcribes the recording, translates it into English and creates the dubbed version while retaining the faculty member's voice characteristics and the timing of the original lecture. The translated script can then be reviewed for business terminology, names, examples and academic context before the English version is released.
This allows Hindi to remain the original teaching language while the same faculty-led lecture is made available in English, without requiring a second recording session.
The model becomes especially important at the scale of the BBA curriculum.
Each academic year includes 10 courses. Every course has at least 30 hours of asynchronous content and 30 hours of live teaching, with live sessions also translated after they conclude.
This translates to:
- 600+ hours of content requiring translation and dubbing each year.
- Around 700 hours annually when additional sessions, supplementary resources and other engagements are included.
- 1,800 to 2,100 hours of content across the first three bilingual years of the BBA.
At that volume, the value of the workflow is not simply that an individual lecture can be dubbed. It gives IIM Udaipur a way to build bilingual delivery into the production of the curriculum itself, rather than running a parallel recording process for English.
There is also an early indication that learners are using both versions. English-dubbed videos are already receiving at least half as many YouTube views as their corresponding Hindi videos, pointing to meaningful demand for the English version of the course material.
600+
Hours of content per year
Translated and dubbed annually across the BBA curriculum
2,100
Hours across three bilingual years
Total content dubbed from Hindi to English over the first three years of the BBA
50%+
English viewership vs Hindi
English-dubbed lectures already receiving at least half the YouTube views of their Hindi originals
Looking ahead
IIM Udaipur is now working towards making the Hindi-to-English workflow a repeatable part of academic production. As the course library grows, each Hindi master can move through transcription, academic review, English dubbing, sync and release as part of the regular content process.
The immediate priority is to make this Hindi-to-English pathway consistently strong. Over time, the same approach could extend to orientation videos, faculty masterclasses, subtitles, searchable transcripts and accessibility-oriented audio. Other Indian languages may follow based on learner demand and the same standards for academic quality.
The larger goal remains to allow faculty to teach naturally in the language of their choice, while making the same teaching accessible to learners in another language without having to produce the curriculum twice.
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