The Central Institute of Indian Languages set up in 1969 is entrusted with the responsibility of developing Indian languages through research trainging and material production. The Indian languages are at various stages of development from the point of view of extent of elaboration of their finctions and they require different treatments. Development of the trial languages of the country involves many issues of policy, implementation and academic contrbution. Some of them are to be reduced to writting and most of them need codification from the point of view of standardisation, preparation of grammar, dictionary and such other linguist materials and production of written literature.

One of the primary activities of the Institute relating to its work on tribal languages is writting a grammar. The grammar is not only the first step in the direction of codification of the language but also is a basic material for the teaching and learning of the language. It also provides materials for the typological and areal comparisions for languages universals. The theoretical notions about grammar have changed substantially in the recent decades and many of the notions are to be tested with data from various little-known languages. It is hoped that the grammar series of the Institute will fulfil at least partially these demands from linguist and language planners.

The grammars of various tribal languages, it is hoped, will lead to a handbook of Indian Lnaguages, which will be great use to the students of linguistics in India. India has a long grammatical tradition and it is now absorbing the grammatical modles developed in the west. It will be a worthy goal to achive to develop a grammatical model for the description of Indian languages derived out of both traditional and modern developments.