REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP) 

English Annotation of Student Voice Recordings from Gujarat 

Closing Date for Submission 

<January 30, 2026>

I. INTRODUCTION

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.

II. BACKGROUND

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 analyse 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 for the Gujarati and Hindi languages. We are now adapting the tool for English in Gujarat, and to build a highly contextualized ASR model for English, we need human-generated transcripts of students’ voice recordings collected from schools across Gujarat in partnership with the Gujarat Government.

III. PROJECT OBJECTIVES

To create timestamped human transcriptions of student voice recordings from Grades 5–8 reading sets of letters, words, non-words, and paragraphs in English, collected from select districts in Gujarat. For Grades 5–8, each individual word/letter heard in the recording must be timestamped and transcribed verbatim in English exactly as heard by the human annotator (no corrections for grammar, spelling, or pronunciation).  

• Audio Files: Recordings of students reading English letters, words, non-words, and paragraphs.
• Reference Text: The exact English text the student was instructed to read; this text will be used to identify miscues.
• Reference audios (if available): One or more gold-standard readings of the corresponding reference text.

Submission Details  

• All proposals to this RFP must be received no later than <January 30th>. The proposal should be submitted only through e-mail in PDF format addressed to The Procurement Team at the below-given e-mail id: rfp.lehs@wadhwaniai.org. The email's subject line must contain the reference number and title of the RFP: English Transcriptions of Student Voice Recordings of Reading - Gujarat (Name of the partner).
• Any proposals received by Wadhwani-AI after the deadline for submission of proposals prescribed in the timeline of this document are liable to be rejected.

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

Job Email ID: rfp.lehs(at)wadhwaniai.org

Download Attachment: RFP for English Annotation of Student Voice Recordings from Gujarat.pdf