People's Archive of Rural India is a digital journalism platform in India. It was founded in December 2014 by veteran journalist, Palagummi Sainath, former rural affairs editor of The Hindu, author of the landmark book "Everybody Loves a Good Drought" and winner of numerous national and international awards. PARI focuses on rural journalism and publishes articles, videos and photo stories in numerous categories including Farming and its Crisis, Things We Do, Adivasis, Dalits and Resource Conflicts PARI's stories are translated in as many as thirteen Indian languages.PARI showcases the occupational, linguistic and cultural diversity of India and covers a countryside that the dominant media usually ignore. At the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture on May 3, 2016, N. Ram, Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd, and former editor-in-chief and publisher of The Hindu cited PARI as "one of the brightest spots of public-spirited journalism”
Content
PARI is unique in its focus on and extensive documentation of rural Indian lives and livelihoods. Its coverage draws on the extensive work spanning more than three decades of founder-editor P. Sainath on the agrarian economy and current devastating agrarian and water crisis in rural India. PARI reporters include Jaideep Hardikar, Purusottam Thakur, Parth M. N., Aparna Karthikeyan, Arpita Chakrabarty and Anubha Bhonsle. The content at People's Archive of Rural India is contributed by volunteers, students, journalists and by PARI fellows. PARI contributors have also included award-winning journalists like Madhusree Mukerjee, Priyanka Kakodkar, Shalini Singh and Chitrangada Choudhury. The archive documents rapidly-disappearing languages like the Saimar language which had only 7 speakers left at the time of publication. This part of a larger project of documenting endangered languages. The "Resources" section of PARI contains curated and credible reports on rural India along with a focus and factoids that PARI's team of researchers produce.
Fellowships
Fellowships are awarded for work on specific regions in India. A PARI fellow spends significant time in fieldwork among the region's people and communities and reports on untold stories from the countryside.
Impact
The story on a post office of a village in Pithoragarh district, [Uttarakhand went viral on social media immediately on publishing. Within 4 days of the article being published, Pitthorgarh finally had its own post office. Stories reported on PARI have been re-published by Economic & Political Weekly,, The Wire, Scroll.in, BBC Hindi, Times of India, Youth ki Awaaz, Saddhahaq.com, SunTV, and Mathrubhumi Weekly.
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
The film, "Weaves of Maheshwar” by Nidhi Kamath and Keya Vaswani was awarded the Silver Lotus for the Best Promotional Film at the 63rd National Film Awards 2016
On 23 June 2016, PARI received the Praful Bidwai Memorial Award for recording and documenting rural India.< The award was presented by noted historian and public intellectualRomila 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”.
