Bangladesh AI Policy & Innovation Lab (BAPIL)

An independent research initiative designing a trustworthy AI policy-intelligence capability for Bangladesh, from the White Paper to a Technical Blueprint with a tested reference implementation.

The Bangladesh AI Policy & Innovation Lab (BAPIL) is an independent research initiative that designs how artificial intelligence can support evidence-based policymaking in Bangladesh, in Bangla and English, under explicit safeguards. BAPIL is a proposal: no institution has been established and no funding has been approved.

The work has two stages. The White Paper (Version 1.0, July 2026) sets out the conceptual framework and a vision to 2041. The Technical Blueprint (Version 1.0, October 2026) turns it into a buildable plan, with a tested open-source reference implementation and a separate eleven-page Blueprint Summary.

What the Technical Blueprint specifies

  • An institutional design: a university-anchored lab under a government MoU, with a Steering Board, an independent Ethics and Risk Review Committee and a Technical Architecture Board.
  • A reference architecture of twelve open, replaceable components, hosted in Bangladesh.
  • A bilingual, citation-grounded search and answer design that cites official sources or abstains, and a planned open benchmark (BanglaPolicyQA).
  • Data rules (four data classes, public data first) designed for Bangladesh's 2026 data-protection and data-management laws.
  • An assurance system: risk tiers, lifecycle gates, model cards and a public transparency register, mapped to OECD, UNESCO, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and the EU AI Act.
  • Six pilots, a preparatory Phase 0 and a 36-month delivery plan with an indicative budget, a logical framework, KPIs and a risk register.
  • A strategic roadmap for 2026 to 2041 and beyond, and six decisions requested from the authorities.

BAPIL reference architecture (Technical Blueprint, Figure 4).

Reference implementation

The repository contains a small, dependency-free Python implementation of the core ideas, released with the Blueprint as version 0.1.0: Bangla text normalisation, bilingual BM25 search, cited extractive answers with abstention, risk-tier assessment, an AI system register with a transparency export, evaluation metrics and a hash-chained audit log. It has 49 unit tests that run on GitHub Actions. It is a research prototype, not a production system.

Strategic roadmap

Strategic roadmap, 2026 to 2041 and beyond (Technical Blueprint, Figure 13).

Publications

Project status

  • Status: active independent research initiative; a proposal, not an established institution
  • Latest release: GitHub release v1.1.0 (Technical Blueprint and Blueprint Summary, Version 1.0)
  • Licences: publications CC BY 4.0; code MIT
  • Next steps: stakeholder consultation, independent expert review and a journal manuscript on the framework

Resources

GitHub repository
github.com/md-naim-hassan-saykat/bapil

Release v1.1.0 (PDFs of the Technical Blueprint and Blueprint Summary)
github.com/md-naim-hassan-saykat/bapil/releases/tag/v1.1.0