Govt. to launch Adivasi languages translation app

Aadi Vaani, the Union government’s Artificial-Intelligence-based translation model for Adivasi languages in India, is set to see its beta version launched on Monday (September 1, 2025), officials said.

The application will be tested by the Tribal Affairs Ministry as part of Adi Karmayogi, the country-wide capacity-building exercise in tribal districts.

The app, which the Tribal Affairs Ministry has been developing for a little over a year now, will be launched with capabilities to translate the following Adivasi languages: Bhili (Bhil language), Mundari (Munda language), Gondi (Gond language), Santali (Santal language), Kui (Kandha language), and Garo (Garo language), officials said. The app will be able to translate speech and text in Hindi and English to these languages and vice versa.

Officials explained that the Ministry has been building a corpus (database) of sentences in each of these languages from experts. Each of the languages has a corpus of over one lakh sentences.

Resource persons from tribal research institutes across the country, in collaboration with IIT Delhi, BITS Pilani, and the IIITs in Hyderabad and Naya Raipur, have developed this application. The corpus was built by identifying experts who read, speak, and write these languages. The experts who have worked on creating the database include schoolteachers, university professors, researchers, and community leaders from the regions where these languages are spoken.

Among the six languages, Bhili (or Bhilodi) is the most commonly spoken, according to the 2011 Census, which recorded over 1.04 crore Bhili speakers in India, most of them in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. This is followed by Santali, which is spoken by about 73.68 lakh people (mostly in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam); Gondi, spoken by 29.84 lakh people (largely in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra); and Mundari, spoken by about 11.28 lakh people (concentrated in Jharkhand and Odisha). Kui is spoken by around 9.41 lakh people, mostly in Odisha, and Garo by about 11.45 lakh people, most of them in Meghalaya and Assam.

Ministry officials said that, to begin with, the app has used publicly available content — including speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi — to train the model. Content in the Adivasi languages that has been fed into the model includes community folklore and traditional songs.

Senior officials in the Tribal Affairs Ministry said that the Adi Karmayogi initiative would be the ideal testing ground to start using the app. “Through the wide use during the workshop and training exercises part of Adi Karmayogi, the corpus of each language will increase and the large language model’s (LLM) performance will improve,” an official said. The app’s beta version will be made available on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store for members of the public to start using it. “The nature of LLMs is such that it will only get better with more use as more data is fed into it,” the official said.

Officials who worked on the app’s development said that a major challenge was to find an adequate number of experts who could help build the corpus, as the task of recording audio and writing the language’s script for the app’s database was a “time-consuming” one.

“Further, the issue is that the people helping us with the corpus are also schoolteachers and professors, who have their own schedules,” one of the officials said.

A Ministry official said that the application had been put through “international standards for testing accuracy of translations”, and that it had “more than met the requirements for accuracy” so far. The government intends to use the app widely during the Adi Karmayogi initiative, through which the Ministry is targetting capacity-building of about 20 lakh volunteers, village officials, and community leaders across one lakh tribal villages in 550 districts of the country.

“There will also be a specific feedback mechanism on Adi Karmayogi portals to report on the usage of the Aadi Vaani app, and the app, of course, will also have one,” the official added.

Published – August 31, 2025 03:45 am IST