Low-resource tribal languages face a dual threat of extinction and digital exclusion. Examine how AI-driven platforms like Adi Vaani can address both.

India's Scheduled Tribes, about 10.45 crore people or 8.6% of the population (Census 2011) [1], mostly speak low-resource languages. These are largely oral and have little written or digital data. Adi Vaani, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs' AI platform launched in beta on 1 September 2025 [2], addresses both threats, though unevenly.

Nature of the dual threat

• Extinction: these languages pass on by speech, so knowledge is lost when elders die. Few primers or dictionaries exist.
• Digital exclusion: current language technology barely supports them. This cuts speakers off from education, health information, public services and markets [1].

Addressing extinction: documentation

• Corpus building from scratch: the target is about 1 lakh sentence pairs and 100 hours of speech per language. TRIs had supplied about 13.9 lakh sentences by October 2026 [1].
• Digitising folklore and oral traditions: an IIT Delhi-led consortium is doing this with the TRIs of five states [2].
• AdiKosh word bank, primers and dictionaries: these are meant to feed a proposed National Tribal Language Repository [1].
• Community-based AI: native speakers contribute data and experts validate it, which keeps the language authentic [1].

Addressing exclusion: access

• Real-time text and speech translation between Hindi/English and Santali, Mundari, Bhili and Gondi [2].
• Mother-tongue learning, in line with NEP 2020's call for home-language teaching at least till Grade 5 [1].
• Health outreach, for example under the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission [1].

Limitations

• Speech gap: only about 300 hours of speech have been collected against a combined target of about 1,300 hours. Speech tools are therefore weakest for users who cannot read [1].
• Uneven coverage: only 9 of the 13 languages covered had text translation [1]. The Ministry gave Parliament no usage figures [3].
• Data sovereignty: consent, sacred knowledge and choosing one dialect as the standard are still open issues. UNESCO has issued guidelines on these questions [4].

Adi Vaani turns endangered oral heritage into usable digital resources and opens services to tribal speakers. To make it last, the Ministry should record elders' speech first, publish data and usage figures for each language, link the platform with Bhashini, and set community consent rules before the repository opens. If its primers reach classrooms such as Eklavya Model Residential Schools, it can serve Article 29's protection of distinct languages and SDG 4, so that tribal voices are heard and not only recorded.