Adi Vaani Now Translates Nine Tribal Languages Using AI

On Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs released a background note on Adi Vaani, the artificial-intelligence platform it runs for tribal languages. The platform was launched on 1 September 2025 and was built by a national consortium led by IIT Delhi, working with BITS Pilani, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Nava Raipur and the Tribal Research Institutes of Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Meghalaya. Other State institutes joined later. Most tribal tongues are low-resource languages with little written or recorded material, which is why ordinary translation software has never served them.

Where the platform stands

Beginning with Santali, Bhili, Mundari and Gondi, Adi Vaani offered text translation in nine tribal languages as on 15 October 2026 and works on 13 languages in all. It also does speech translation, optical character recognition, video subtitling and gives access to more than 300 language primers and 24 dictionaries. Android downloads have crossed 35,000 and monthly users stand at about 6,500.

Languages and scripts

Built with the speakers themselves

Native speakers add words, sentences and recordings through the Tribal Research Institutes and through AdiKosh, the platform's word bank, and language experts verify the material before it trains any model. The aim is roughly 1,00,000 sentence pairs and 100 hours of speech for each language; by 15 October 2026 State institutes had supplied about 13.9 lakh written sentences across ten languages and close to 300 hours of speech. Each language moves through five stages, from collection to live use, and models are trained afresh as more data arrives.

A national repository in the making

A Working Group on Tribal Languages met for the first time on 15 October 2026 under Ranjana Chopra, Secretary, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, with members from the Central Institute of Indian Languages, IITs and universities. It weighed turning Adi Vaani into the National Tribal Language Repository, holding corpora, primers, dictionaries and community stories, and proposed district-level resource groups of trained tribal youth and a two-year action plan with quarterly review. An upgraded Adi Vaani, an iOS app and five more languages had been introduced earlier at the National Conclave on Tribal Languages and Museums in Mysuru on 24 August 2026, where the ministry also signed an agreement with the Central Institute of Indian Languages. Census 2011 counted about 10.45 crore Scheduled Tribe people, nearly 8.6 per cent of the population, and the National Education Policy 2020 asks for teaching in the mother tongue at least to Class 5, which these primers can support across more than 525 Eklavya Model Residential Schools.

The day itself

Janjatiya Gaurav Pakhwada ran from 1 to 15 November 2026 and ended on Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas, the birth anniversary of Dharti Aaba Bhagwan Birsa Munda, which the Government of India fixed as a national observance in 2021. More than 300 projects for tribal communities were taken up on the day, 228 of them for inauguration and 74 for foundation stones, and the Jan-HIT Portal and the National FRA Digital Platform were launched. Tribal Research Institutes planned over 160 activities in 19 States and Union Territories.