Program Associate

Program Associate, Tribal Language Data Collection (Maharashtra)

Job description About the role

We are building the first-ever digital speech and text datasets for tribal and low-resource languages of Maharashtra, under a government programme with the district administration and a technical validation partner. As Program Associate, you will move to the district and run the programme end to end, from signing local partners to final handover.

This is real ground-level work. Nothing here can be sourced online. You will build the team, train the community and deliver the data.

What you will do

• Mobilise the district: sign MoUs with local institutions, get the nodal officer's sign-off on SOPs, open the field office and set up contributor payouts

• Recruit and train native-speaker recorders, transcribers, translators and validators, many with no prior annotation experience, and keep attendance and certification records

• Run the speech line: set daily recording targets, check acceptance daily and track weekly hours against the required mix (read, conversational, spontaneous, voice commands, studio/TTS)

• Run the text line: distribute sentence batches, track translation pairs per translator per day, validate and maintain the glossary

• Prepare expert-review sample packs, log every correction and push it back through the team

• Report QC coverage exactly as performed, never more than what was done

• Maintain the client dashboard and weekly status report, and attend district review meetings

• Close the handover with final validation, packaging and technical-partner sign-off

What we are looking for

• Graduate in any discipline (Linguistics, Social Work or Development Studies is a plus)

• 1 to 2 years in field operations, programme delivery or community-based projects, including managing a distributed team

• Fluent in Marathi and Hindi, with working English for reporting

• Comfortable with Excel or Google Sheets and mobile apps

• Confident dealing with a Collector's office and a technical partner in the same week

• Willing to relocate to the district for the full project term and travel to remote areas

Good to have

• Experience in speech, NLP, transcription or translation projects

• Familiarity with a tribal language community (for example Gondi, Madia, Korku, Warli or Bhili)

• Experience with government or CSR-funded projects

How you will be measured

Milestones hit on the contractual timeline, volumes at or above target, contributors trained and certified on time, a falling expert-review correction rate, and zero unapproved deviations from SOP.