When Bikram Biruly returned home after completing his PhD last month, residents of Matkam Sahi, a Ho Adivasi village in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district welcomed with traditional dama, dumaṅ and mandar drums, songs and dance. It was a felicitous reception to a 29-year-old working to preserve the Ho language using AI, significant for a tribe long battling threats to its cultural identity.

Bikram, who traces his roots to Jharkhand’s Kolhan region, earned his PhD at Odisha’s Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KiSS) in September, the first Ho researcher to use AI to preserve the language, which, according to the 2011 Census, is spoken by approximately 1.4 million people, most of them in Jharkhand.

The Ho community has for long been demanding inclusion of the Ho language in the Eighth Schedule

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