EQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP) Telugu Transcriptions of Student Voice Recordings of Reading Closing Date for Submission October 11, 2025, at 23:59 PM 

 LEHS is a charitable organization in India whose purpose is to offer basic health and education for the poor. LEHS in furtherance of charitable objectives through its flagship programs Wadhwani AI which aims to build equitable and sustainable systems by making quality primary healthcare available and accessible to the underserved population and to bring the benefits of modern AI technology to underserved populations by building and deploying AI solutions for social impact across domains such as healthcare, agriculture, governance and education in India. LEHS aims to promote the integration of technologies, particularly in emerging domains like artificial intelligence and innovations into the Indian mainstream primary healthcare, education, and agriculture systems through a partnership with the State and National Government, apex institutions, international agencies, and private sector partners e.g. innovators, social enterprises and other ecosystem contributors in line with its stated objectives for the betterment of society particularly focusing on projects of national and social significance. Wadhwani AI, a unit of LEHS, focuses on developing, deploying and evaluating artificial intelligence solutions to address critical social challenges in India, particularly in domains such as healthcare, agriculture, and education. LEHS aims to promote the integration of technologies, particularly in emerging domains like artificial intelligence and innovations into the Indian mainstream primary healthcare, education, and agriculture systems through a partnership with the State and National Government, apex institutions, international agencies, and private sector partners e.g. innovators, social enterprises and other ecosystem contributors in line with its stated objectives for the betterment of society particularly focusing on projects of national and social significance. In line with its mission to support projects of national and social significance, LEHS also undertakes rigorous monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) activities to assess the impact, usability, and scalability of different programmatic interventions. 

 A significant number of students in Indian public schools (Grades 1–8) lack foundational reading skills, impacting their academic progression across all subjects. This challenge is compounded by the absence of scalable, data-driven tools for assessing reading in diverse languages and for identifying specific proficiency levels to enable targeted interventions. In response, Wadhwani AI has developed an AI-powered tool that automates the assessment of foundational reading skills. The tool leverages highly contextualized and fine-tuned Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models to analyze word and paragraph reading, generating key performance metrics and identifying specific reading miscues. Our solution also applies an intelligent layer to cohort students into reading levels, providing teachers with actionable insights for planning targeted classroom interventions. To date, Wadhwani AI has assessed over 7 million students in Gujarat and Rajasthan. We are now adapting the tool for Telugu language for the state of Andhra Pradesh, and to build a highly contextualized ASR model for Telugu, we need human generated transcripts of students’ voice recordings reading words and paragraphs that we are collecting from different districts in AP in partnership with the AP Government. 

 To create timestamped human transcriptions of student voice recordings from Grade 1 and 2 reading sets of words and paragraphs in Telugu collected from 26 districts in Andhra Pradesh. Each individual word heard in the recording needs to be timestamped and transcribed as heard by the human annotator. In addition 4 special labels will be used to indicate fillers, noise, multiple speakers and accent influenced pronunciation. Language: Telugu Total Number of Hours to be annotated : ~100 hours 

 The selected agency is expected to: Human Transcription 

• Each individual student recording needs to be transcribed in Telugu with timestamps for each individual word
• Annotators should transcribe exactly what they hear, including mispronunciations, partially read words, incorrectly read words etc.

Labels 

• In addition to the speech transcript, wherever appropriate, labels are to be added to the audio - for denoting presence of Fillers, Noise, Long silence, Mumbling, Multiple Speakers and Accent Influenced Pronunciation.
• Whenever a word is read in a broken manner with pauses between sounds, a special label indicating intra-word pause needs to be marked at all instances of such pauses.

Quality Review 

• An internal system of quality check should be in place for every transcription, both for quality of transcription and for quality of labels.
• The transcripts should be delivered to Wadhwani AI in batches of 20 hours each, and two rounds of quality check feedback might be given by Wadhwani AI on each batch. WIAI’s review will include review of transcriptions as well as review of labels. 

Data Policy 

• Wadhwani AI will share anonymized data, stripped of PII uploaded in a bucket with the selected agency
• The agency needs to have processes in place to prevent download of data by individual annotators
• The agency needs to give an undertaking agreeing to not use this voice data for their own use

Formatting & Delivery Delivering translations in a JSON format as specified by Wadhwani AI Submission Instructions:  

• Both Technical and Financial Proposals must be submitted electronically to rfp.lehs@wadhwaniai.org separately. 
• Financial Proposal must be password protected.
• All documents should be in PDF format.
• Subject line of the email: 

1. “Technical Proposal for Telugu Transcriptions of Student Voice Recordings of Reading – [Agency / Vendor Name]”
2. “Financial Proposal for Telugu Transcriptions of Student Voice Recordings of Reading – [Agency / Vendor Name]” along with password.  

• Submission Deadline: [October 11, 2025 – 23:59 Hours]
• Any proposals received after the deadline for submission of proposals prescribed in the timeline of this document are liable to be rejected.
• Bidders who submit complete technical with password protected financial proposals and all mandatory enclosures (Section IX) will be considered only

  For detailed information, please check the complete version of the RFP attached below.

Job Email ID:

rfp.lehs(at)wadhwaniai.org

Download Attachment:

RFP Telugu Annotation Education ORF.pdf