Tribal Languages Working Group meets; Adi Vaani to become language repository

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs held the first meeting of its new Working Group on Tribal Languages in New Delhi on Thursday, 15 October 2026. The meeting, chaired by Ministry Secretary Ranjana Chopra and run in a hybrid workshop format, set out a framework for documenting, preserving, researching and teaching India's tribal languages, and reviewed Adi Vaani, the tribal-language translation platform that IIT Delhi built with the ministry. Chopra said Adi Vaani could grow from a translation tool into a full language repository, and proposed that the effort work with the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) Division of the Ministry of Education.

Much of India's knowledge about plants, medicine, farming, weather, forests and local history is held not in manuscripts but in spoken tribal languages. Songs, stories, place names and the words for particular herbs or seasons carry information that has been passed down orally for generations. When a language loses its speakers, that knowledge usually goes with it, because there was never a written record to fall back on. A national body focused on recording these languages is therefore as much about preserving a knowledge system as about protecting a mother tongue.

The meeting matters for the Indian Knowledge Systems effort in particular. The IKS Division, set up under the Ministry of Education in 2020 to support research on India's knowledge traditions, has so far funded 38 tribal studies projects. Linking it formally with the tribal affairs ministry, tribal universities and the social science research council would bring oral traditions into the same research framework that already covers Sanskrit texts and manuscript collections. That gives tribal knowledge the kind of academic structure, funding route and documentation standard that written traditions have long enjoyed.

The proposals put forward at the meeting were practical. K. Sreenivasa Rao, a former secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, suggested searchable state-wise and language-wise directories of writers, scholars and resources, district-level community groups with trained tribal youth working as researchers, the revival of existing tribal language institutions, community digital archives hosted through Adi Vaani, and a two-year action plan reviewed every quarter. Karthick Narayanan, executive director of CoDIN, proposed a federated network of digital archives sharing common metadata standards, with Adi Vaani as the national gateway. Amalesh Gope of Tezpur University offered expertise in speech technology for tonal languages and dictionaries and speech data for languages of the North-East.

Technology is the other half of the plan. IIT Delhi, which developed Adi Vaani, asked the group for help checking the accuracy of its language data, standardising spelling and writing systems, and building specialised vocabulary for planned pilot projects. Many tribal languages have no single agreed script or spelling, which makes machine translation and search difficult. Expert linguists settling these questions with community speakers is a necessary step before the tools can be relied on in schools or offices.

Short-term: The ministry will circulate the meeting's agenda and draw up a roadmap. Member institutions are expected to start helping IIT Delhi validate Adi Vaani's data and agree on spellings and vocabulary for pilot projects.

Long-term: If the repository plan goes ahead, Adi Vaani could become a single national archive of tribal-language corpora, primers, dictionaries and community stories, giving researchers in Indian Knowledge Systems a structured source for oral traditions alongside manuscript collections.

Who is affected: Tribal communities whose languages and oral knowledge stand to be recorded, teachers and students who need learning material in tribal languages, linguists and IKS researchers, Tribal Research Institutes in the states, and officials who use Adi Vaani to communicate with tribal citizens.

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