SIH26042Software
Al-Powered Vernacular Pedagogy and Real-Time Translation Tool for Mother Tongue-Based Primary Education
Governmcnt of Jharkhand
Official Description
Background:
Jharkhand's PALASH Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) programme has demonstrated measurable improvements in foundational literacy among tribal children. However,scaling the programme is severely bottlenecked by a shortage of teachers proficient in tribal languages including Ho, Mundari, and Santhali -languages with limited digital NLP resources. The vast majority of teachers assigned to tribal-area primary schools are Hindi-medium trained and lack the linguistic tools to deliver mother-tongue-based instruction. Without a technology bridge, the pedagogical intent of MTB-MLE cannot be realised at scale, and children in over 5,000 tribal-area primary schools continue to receive instruction in a language they do not comprehend at home.
Description:
Develop an Al-assisted translation and curriculum-generation software suite that enables non-nativespeaking primary school teachers to deliver mother-tongue-based instruction in Ho, Mundari, and Santhali without prior language training. The system must include an NLP engine capable of translating standard Hindi Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) curriculum content- including lesson scripts, activity instructions, and assessment prompts-into contextually accurate text and synthesised audio in target tribal languages. A real-time voice-to-voice translation feature must allow a teacher speaking Hindi to conduct interactive classroom dialogue with tribal-language-speaking students, with latency not exceeding three seconds. The system must auto-generate bilingual worksheets and visual flashcard sets aligned to the NIPUN Bharat learning outcomes framework.Given that most schools in the target deployment areas lack reliable internet, the entire application must function offline on low-cost tablets (?2 GB RAM, Android 9+) after initial content synchronisation.
Expected Solution:
A working software application demonstrating Hindi-to-tribal-language translation (minimum one tribal language at prototype stage), real-time voice translation with sub-3-second latency, autogenerated bilingual worksheet output, and full offline operation on a low-end Android tablet submitted with a demo video - and GitHub repository.
Official Hackathon Facts
Theme / DomainSmart Education
Track TrackSoftware
Submission Deadline20 September 2026
Ideas Registered0/500
✨ SIH Fit Analysis
Estimated DifficultyIntermediate
Social Impact Score (2/5)
N/A
Primary Tech AreaWeb / Mobile / Full Stack
Technology Stack Tags
NLPSpeech AIMobile Development
Suggested Skills
NLP libraries (spaCy/HuggingFace)Speech processing (Whisper/Kaldi)Flutter / React Native
✦ Why This Problem is Interesting
A domain-focused engineering problem where the solution approach should be driven by the requirements described in the official problem statement.
* Note: SIH Fit Analysis contains derived ratings and classification schemas generated to aid team selection; these are not official ratings from the Smart India Hackathon organizers.
