As PARI completes its tenth year in December 2024, we are into a major makeover. What was launched in 2014 as a small, modest website with limited content in just one language is now a giant repository of knowledge on all things rural, accessible in 15 languages. We now have to deal with much larger audiences navigating a far more complex site than we were when we began.

The makeover you now see, access and use, is the outcome of the inspirational brilliance of designer Samudra Gupta and its wonderful execution by Swecha’s fantastic team of techies including Bhavya Karne, Bhuvan Krishna, Vignan Anil Sunkara, Praveen Chandrahas and Kiran Chandra.

When PARI was still a fledgling notion, Prof. Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, then Dean of Faculty, Liberal Arts & Professional Studies of York University, Toronto, made a critical contribution to its ideas, concepts and clarity. The strong education-related component of PARI owes a great deal to her influence.
 

In 2011, we founded the CounterMedia Trust (CMT) which remains the parent body for PARI  and runs it. However, work on the idea of PARI had begun before that date and went on till its launch on December 20, 2014. No one played a more important role in giving it a structure and stability than Namita Waikar. She was and remains crucial to PARI’s functioning.

Volunteer techies from ThoughtWorks India in our early years made the PARI platform possible. Many helped in immeasurable ways, but Manoj Mahalingam (then with TW) and Satish Viswanathan played key roles in getting us off the ground. Siddharth Adelkar was and is central to our overall effort. He is PARI’s Tech Editor.

PARI owes a major debt of gratitude to Bernard Bel, Asha Ogale, Jitendra Maid and Rajani Khaladkar for building the Grindmill Songs Database which is now an important part of the PARI archive. This huge endeavour is spearheaded by Namita Waiker. We are likewise grateful to the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS) in collaboration with whom we are now building a growing collection of Kutchi songs curated by Pratishtha Pandya.

As PARI entered Phase 2 of its existence, we had Aditya Dipankar making an astonishing difference to the website’s design and appearance. We also had the inimitable Thejaswi Puthraya who was there for us, from before the launch, on all matters tech and some beyond. And we had Sharmila Joshi who served as Executive Editor for several years and who established PARI’s style and high editorial standards.

If PARI has won acclaim as a brilliantly visual website – that has much to do with Binaifer Bharucha, our photo editor and the exacting standards she brings to our work. And there’s no way we can thank enough our great photographers including M. Palani Kumar, Ritayan Mukherjee, Sanket Jain and a host of others.

Priti David has for years led the flourishing PARI Education programme as has Vishaka George our highly successful social media outreach. The great success of these two sectors of PARI certainly owes much to the enthusiasm and encouragement of Bina Shah and Amira Shah Chhabra.

The stoic calm and patience of Zahra Latif has for several years been both, a great efficiency booster and a healthy influence on PARI’s own culture. Samyukta Shastri was the very first staffer that PARI took on and great to work with – and we are delighted to have her back now as a CMT trustee.

Smita Khator has been for five years central to PARI’s unique language universe. When she came to PARI, we were publishing in 7 Indian languages with some regularity. Now PARI publishes in 15 (including English). 

Oorna Raut, before she left to pursue higher studies, played a major role in the evolution and development of our Library, a major PARI USP. Kanika Gupta, now with us for years has, apart from her other duties, emerged a fine projects manager for some of PARI’s most complex endeavours.

Sinchita Maji and Shreya Katyayini pioneered PARI’s video films section. And we progressed to a point where Suchitra, one of India’s oldest film societies, hosted a two-day festival of just PARI films in Bengaluru in 2019.

Scores of others helped in big and many ways: 

We thank all the volunteers who have translated for PARI for their skill and efforts in making PARI available to larger audiences/readers. We also thank all those who have volunteered to make our Library easy to access and use through their work of summarising the resources.

A very special thanks to P.R. Gandhi, Kartik Shah, Deepak Soni, Minakshi Nikam and Eesha Thakkar of P.R. Gandhi & Co, Mumbai, and Prakash Shah of Delhi, for their invaluable assistance.

We also wish to acknowledge the huge encouragement and support we have got, and continue to get, from individuals like Abhijit Dutta, Anil Choudhury, Mariam Ram, Romi Mahajan, Sudarshan Loyalka, Sudhanva Deshpande and Vijay Prashad.

There are others who have made major contributions that have shaped and enriched PARI. These include – though not an exhaustive list – Aparna Karthikeyan, Chitrangada Choudhury, Jaideep Hardikar, Kavitha Iyer, Kavitha Muralidharan, Mausumi Bhattacharyya, Olivia Waring, Puja Awasthi, Purusottam Thakur, Ritayan Mukherjee, Sangeeta Menon, Shalini Singh, Shraddha Agarwal, Subuhi Jiwani, Swagata Gupta and Vinutha Mallya.
 

Other well-wishers who chipped in very early with their inputs, labour, stories, or other assistance, included, Madhusreee Mukherjee, Sweta Daga, Sukhada Tatke, Urvashi Sarkar and Vidyut Kale.

We are greatly indebted to the volunteers, journalists, filmmakers and other contributors who continue to gift us so much time and labour. There are too many in number to list here. There may be a few names we’ve missed out for which we seek pardon. There are also some whom we cannot name because, alas, of where they are working presently.

P. Sainath
Founder Editor, PARI

January, 2025