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Tribal Languages Find New Life Through Innovative Education Model Vidarbha

A teacher in a tribal school showing how Tribal Languages Find New Life Through Innovative Education Model Vidarbha
Tribal Languages Find New Life Through Innovative Education Model Vidarbha

A small organisation has developed a practical solution to one of India's most pressing educational challenges of the disconnect between children's home languages and classroom instruction.


The Institute for Multilingual Education (IMLi) has created a model that allows tribal children to learn in their mother tongue while maintaining the state curriculum.


Their work in Vidarbha demonstrates how targeted interventions can reach thousands of learners without requiring massive policy overhauls or substantial funding. The approach has already shown measurable improvements in literacy rates and school attendance among tribal communities.


This grassroots initiative offers a template that could be replicated across other marginalised language communities throughout the country.


Breaking Down Language Barriers in Tribal Education


The Institute for Multilingual Education emerged from a recognition that Vidarbha's linguistic diversity was not being reflected in its classrooms.

Founded by education consultant Alaknanda Sanap in 2017 and formally registered in Pune in 2018, IMLi operates as a registered not-for-profit trust with a clear mission to support and promote reading and multilingual education whilst engaging with community knowledge and culture for children's all-around development.


The organisation's operational structure relies on four key pillars. First, they curate and translate high-quality children's books into vulnerable languages. Second, they conduct capacity-building workshops for government primary teachers. Third, they establish community-managed mini-libraries in anganwadis and low-resource schools. Fourth, they advocate with district education officers and Tribal Development authorities for mother-tongue materials.


IMLi's founders recognised that the strongest impact would come from working in districts where the linguistic distance between home and school was widest.

Yavatmal emerged as the natural testing ground for several compelling reasons. Sub-district data revealed 15,704 Kolami speakers in Yavatmal alone, representing the highest single-location concentration in India.

More than 200 primary schools list Kolami as the dominant home language for at least 75% of pupils. Additionally, the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) Yavatmal maintained a cadre of ten Kolam community teachers who could act as lead translators and trainers during the pilot programme.


The organisation secured micro-grants from philanthropic technology funds and negotiated a memorandum with DIET Yavatmal. They committed to producing a 100-title bilingual digital library in Kolami within one year, branding the initiative "Read with IMLi" for local ownership.


The Kolami Project: From Translation to Transformation


Between September and December 2019, ten government teachers from Yavatmal, Chandrapur, and Nanded undertook the ambitious task of translating 100 picture books from Pratham's open-licence StoryWeaver catalogue into Kolami. The selected books covered everyday narratives, folk tales, early science, and numeracy concepts.


The translation workflow followed a rigorous process. Translators submitted first drafts in a Kolami-Marathi parallel text format.

Senior teachers then reviewed submissions for linguistic accuracy and classroom suitability. Volunteer proofreaders typeset the final text in Devanagari script with an overlaid Roman transliteration for novice readers. StoryWeaver published the completed books online, free of cost.


The entire book set launched on 17 February 2020 at DIET Yavatmal before an audience of district education officers, teacher-trainers, and 60 children from nearby government schools. The launch marked the beginning of a comprehensive teacher training programme.


IMLi conducted a seven-day orientation for 35 primary teachers on "Scientific and Balanced Language Learning" techniques. Trainers modelled shared reading, paired storytelling, and phonemic awareness drills that link Kolami grapheme sequences to Marathi letter knowledge. Each participating teacher received printed miniature copies of the first 40 titles along with lesson-planning templates.


The classroom integration yielded impressive results between June 2020 and March 2021. Two hundred schools received book packets, reaching 3,500 Kolami-speaking pupils who participated in regular read-aloud sessions.


Informal fluency checks showed an average 14-word-per-minute improvement in Marathi reading among Grade 2 pupils after eight months, compared with 5 words per minute in control schools.

Senior teacher Narayan Kolha captured the emotional impact of the programme at the launch event: "For the first time the children see their own village words in print. They pick up the book and smile before even opening it."


The initiative extended beyond schools through community libraries. IMLi worked with nine gram panchayats to convert unused anganwadi corners into "Katta Kutuhal" library spaces stocked with Kolami books and low-cost floor cushions.


Volunteer mothers supervise weekly storytelling circles. Book usage logs show an average 18 titles borrowed per child in six months.


Pandemic school closures accelerated the digital adoption of the materials. More than 24,000 unique users accessed the Kolami library on StoryWeaver between April 2020 and May 2025, including teachers in Gadchiroli who project the ebooks on classroom walls when connectivity allows.


Expanding the Model Across Vidarbha

A teacher teaching a tribal language in Vidarbha
Expanding the Model Across Vidarbha

The success of the Kolami project demonstrated clear potential for replication across other tribal communities in the region. IMLi's work addresses an evident policy gap in Maharashtra's education system.


The state government's bilingual school programme introduced English alongside Marathi in select tribal schools, yet neglected local languages entirely.


The organisation's approach shows that low-cost materials, structured teacher support, and community stewardship offer a practical route for mother-tongue literacy.


Survey data confirm that Kolami remains stable in family use but lacks written resources and school-level reinforcement. By producing a visible print corpus, the project adds prestige and intergenerational legitimacy to the language.


District officers report that drop-outs among Kolami girls fell by 12% in intervention clusters over two academic cycles, attributed partly to improved classroom comprehension and parental interest in the new materials.

The organisation has begun early translation sprints for Korku storybooks with volunteers from Akola and Melghat, areas within the broader Vidarbha region. Parallel teacher training is scheduled for November 2025. The model aligns with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs' push for primers and bilingual dictionaries as laid out under the Support to Tribal Research Institutes scheme.

Current intervention status across the region shows the scope for expansion. Kolami, with 194,671 estimated speakers in Maharashtra across Yavatmal, Chandrapur, and Nanded, now has 100 bilingual picture books and 9 mini-libraries serving 200 district schools.


Korku, with over 200,000 speakers across Akola and Amravati, has a pilot translation under way with 50 titles planned. Gondi, with approximately 1.5 million speakers including those in Gadchiroli, remains at the needs assessment stage with proposed collaboration with the local Tribal Research Centre.


IMLi has developed a multi-pronged expansion plan over the next three years. A rolling fellowship will train 60 tribal teachers to become master-trainers in their home languages, with each fellow mentoring ten peers and documenting classroom innovations.


The organisation is partnering with technologists to integrate a Kolami phonetic keyboard into Android devices, lowering the technical threshold for new content creation.

They plan to pilot an oral reading fluency and comprehension benchmark tailored to agglutinative language structures, providing simple testing tools to track progress and justify resource allocation.


Policy briefs distilled from the Vidarbha experience will be presented to the Maharashtra State Council of Educational Research and Training, arguing for structured mother-tongue transition models that include tribal languages alongside Marathi and English. Community archives will catalogue elders' stories and folk songs recorded during book translation workshops, with local youth trained as oral historians.


IMLi founder Alaknanda Sanap maintains realistic expectations about the challenges ahead. "Books alone cannot save a language, but they spark the pride and practice that keep a language alive," she explained in May 2025. "We now see Kolami children correcting Marathi-medium teachers on pronunciation with confidence."


The institute's modest staff often works from borrowed offices, relying on volunteer translators and micro-grants. Its success hinges on district officials who recognise that language inclusion drives both equity and measurable learning outcomes. The organisation's approach demonstrates that preserving tribal languages need not wait for sweeping policy reform or heavy budgets.


The Kolami pilot not only safeguards a language at risk but also enriches the wider educational fabric of Vidarbha.

Every new title printed, every story hour held, and every confident sentence a child reads in her tongue signal that language, when nurtured, remains the living core of meaningful education. The model offers hope that other marginalised language communities can achieve similar outcomes through disciplined approaches to content creation, teacher support, and community ownership.


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