The Ministry of Tribal Affairs has launched Adi Vaani, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based translator for tribal languages, as part of the month-long Janjatiya Gaurav Varsh marking 150 years of Birsa Munda’s birth, reported India Today.

The beta version currently supports Santali, Bhili, Mundari and Gondi, with plans to add languages such as Kui and Garo.

Preserving endangered languages

According to the 2011 Census, 461 tribal languages are spoken by Scheduled Tribes (STs), of which 81 are vulnerable and 42 critically endangered. With limited documentation and weak transmission across generations, many face extinction. Adi Vaani seeks to address this decline through AI-driven digitisation, translation and preservation.

The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in collaboration with the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, IIIT Nava Raipur and several Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs).

At IIIT Hyderabad, teams under Prof Radhika Mamidi and Prof Anil Vuppala developed machine translation systems for English-Santali and Hindi-Santali, alongside text-to-speech models for Santali, Mundari and Bhili. Data sets were prepared with support from Odisha’s TRI and refined by native speakers.

Beyond translation

The platform translates speech and text in real time, supports optical character recognition (OCR), and aids documentation of oral traditions. It will also make government schemes, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) content and health awareness material accessible in tribal mother tongues.

Calling Adi Vaani “a cultural preservation step as well as a technical product,” the Ministry said it plans to expand the tool to tribal languages of Telangana, including Gondi, Koya, Kolami, Naikdi and Lambadi.