The Ministry of Tribal Affairs has developed Adi Vaani, an AI-powered translation and language platform launched on 1 September 2025 to make tribal languages more accessible through digital tools. As of 15 October 2026, the platform supports text translation in nine tribal languages and has recorded over 35,000 Android downloads with approximately 6,500 monthly active users. The initiative was developed by a national consortium led by IIT Delhi along with BITS Pilani, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Nava Raipur, and State Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) from Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Meghalaya.
State TRIs have contributed approximately 13.9 lakh text sentences across ten languages and around 300 hours of speech data to train the AI models through a community-based approach where native speakers contribute words, sentences, and voice recordings verified by language experts. The project aims to collect around 1,00,000 sentence pairs and 100 hours of speech recordings per language. The platform currently works with 13 tribal languages including Bhili (2,53,634 corpus size), Mundari (3,39,394), Santali (2,19,063), Gondi (1,49,133), Garo (1,33,747), Kui (95,478), Kokborok (63,556), Betta Kuruba (33,635), Katkari (59,160), Koya (45,940), Thadou Kuki, Tangkhul, and Chodri.
Key features of Adi Vaani include text-to-text translation between tribal languages and Hindi/English, speech-to-text conversion, speech-to-speech translation, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for text extraction from images, video subtitling capabilities, and access to more than 300 language primers and 24 dictionaries. The platform uses various scripts including Devanagari, Ol-Chiki, Latin, Odia, Kannada, Telugu, and Gujarati depending on the language.
The Ministry convened the first meeting of the Working Group on Tribal Languages on 15 October 2026, chaired by Smt. Ranjana Chopra, Secretary of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, to discuss positioning Adi Vaani as the National Tribal Language Repository. Proposals include preparing a national baseline of tribal languages, developing digital archives and multilingual educational material, establishing district-level community resource groups, and implementing a two-year action plan with quarterly reviews.
Adi Vaani supports multiple applications including mother-tongue education through integration with 525 Eklavya Model Residential Schools serving over 1.7 lakh students, healthcare communication through translated awareness resources on Sickle Cell Disease (complementing the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission that conducted over 7.24 crore screenings by 16 July 2026), economic empowerment through market information translation, and access to public services. The platform also supports cultural preservation by documenting tribal languages, folk songs, stories, and oral traditions.
The Ministry launched Jago, its official AI conversational assistant, on 24 August 2026 to provide information on tribal welfare schemes. At the National Conclave on Tribal Languages and Museums in Mysuru on 24 August 2026, an upgraded version of Adi Vaani was introduced with an iOS application and five additional languages. The Ministry also signed an MoU with the Central Institute of Indian Languages on language documentation and corpus development.