People's Archive of Rural India

People's Archive of Rural India (PARI, IPA /pɑːrɪ/) (pronounced pāri) is a digital journalism platform in India. Founded by veteran journalist and former Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, Palagummi Sainath, PARI is a volunteer-run rural journalism platform.^[1] With more than a thousand volunteers from across India and other countries, PARI specialises in rural labour and the working lives of Indians^[2] PARI is a multi-lingual platform that has content in up to ten Indian languages, including English, which is translated and reviewed by volunteers.^[3] PARI as online photojournalism interface showcases the occupational, linguistic and anthropological diversity in India.^[4]

At the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture on May 3, 2016. N. Ram, Chairman, Kasturi & Sons Ltd, former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Hindu cited PARI as "one of the brightest spots of public-spirited journalism” ^[5]

Content

The content at People's Archive of Rural India is contributed by volunteers, students, journalists and by PARI fellows. PARI contributors have included award winning journalists like Madhusree Mukerjee, Priyanka Kakodkar, Anubha Bhonsle, Shalini Singh, Chitrangada Choudhury, Jaideep Hardikar and Purusottam Thakur. PARI also carries articles written by students and volunteers. Fellowships are awarded for work on regions in India. A PARI fellow works on a specific region for a year, spending at least three months full-time in fieldwork amongst the region’s people and communities.^[6][7] Contributors also include Guggenheim fellow Madhusree Mukerjee, former editor of Scientific American and writer of the book Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II,^[8] Prince Claus Award winner photo artist Dayanita Singh and founding member of CNN-IBN (now CNN-News18) journalist Anubha Bhonsle^[9]

The archive documents rapidly disappearing languages like the Saimar language which had only 7 speakers left at the time of publication.^[10] "Resources" section of PARI archives searchable reports on rural India like the 2007 Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector This section also has rare, out-of-print books and notable works. On its first anniversary PARI hosted the out of print, difficult to access, 1944 book Famine Over Bengal by the then Hindu correspondent T. G. Narayanan. Based on a first-hand reportage of the Bengal famine of 1943, Famine Over Bengal is a pioneering work of journalism.^[11]

The story on Pithoragarh's post office^[12] went viral on social media immediately on publishing and was shared by several prominent personalities like Nikhil Wagle and Rajdeep Sardesai as something needing addressing. Union Minister for Communication and Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad took keen interest in the matter. Within 4 days of the article being published, Pitthorgarh finally had its own post office.^[13][14]

The content on the online journal has been translated into up to ten Indian languages including English, Assamese, Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Tamil. Stories reported on the People's Archive of Rural India have been re-published by Economic & Political Weekly,^[15] Scroll.in,^[16] BBC Hindi,^[17] Times of India,^[18] Youth ki Awaaz, Saddhahaq.com,^[19] SunTV, Mathrubhumi Weekly. All content on People's Archive of Rural India is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives, 4.0 International License^[20]

Awards

• On 18 March 2016, PARI Fellow Purusottam Thakur won the Laadli Media and Advertising Award: Best Investigative Story Award for his unique story on a girls' educational institute ^[21][22]
• The film, "Weaves of Maheshwar” by Nidhi Kamath and Keya Vaswani was awarded the Silver Lotus (Rajat Kamal) for the Best Promotional Film at the 63rd National Film Awards 2016^[23]
• On 23 June 2016 PARI received the Praful Bidwai Memorial Award for recording and documenting rural India.^[24][25] The award was presented by noted historian and public intellectual Romila Thapar who cited PARI as “Bold in conceptualisation and innovative in methodology, it uses the tools of digital communication, the practice of data storage, and the principles of good journalism to capture the layered realities of a region that is home to over 800 million people speaking in an estimated 700 languages.”.^[26]

References