New Delhi, June 23 -- Nandurbar,

Maharashtra :

When Manisha Warghade sat down to type her own language into a phone, the words weren't there.

She is an associate professor in Navapur, a town in Maharashtra's Nandurbar district, and a native speaker of Bhilali, one of the tongues that shade into one another across the hills where Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh meet. She has worked on tribal languages for years. Yet typing one sentence in her own took a long time, she says, because the words were not available to type. The language had no settled place inside the phone, no keyboard that expected it.

That absence is what a tribal district set out to fill, under a name that aimed higher than a chatbot. In the district's records t...