Shalini Singh

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In a mainstream publication job in the 2000s,
you were likely to be given assignments to write about whisky pairings and
pet weddings rather than ordinary people’s pressing issues. Holding on to your ideals
would result in you being labelled as a ‘jholawala’ (literally, one who
carries a tote bag, an image commonly associated with left leaning activists in
north India, and used as a disparaging term). 



There was no coverage of rural India which
comprises 69 per cent of the country — its 833 million people who speak roughly
800 languages — occupy just 0.67 per cent of the front page of print news
publications, says a 2014 study conducted by the Centre for Media Studies. News
reports from New Delhi alone make up 66 per cent of the news on the main page
of national dailies, it said.



“After 35 years in journalism, I found not a
single newspaper or TV channel had dedicated reporters working full time on
agriculture, labour, and all vital social sectors. They have full-time
correspondents on Bollywood, high society events, business, and no full-time
correspondents for farming and labour. It’s against this background that the
idea of the <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/">People’s
Archive of Rural India</a> (PARI) was born,” says Palagummi Sainath,
PARI’s founder-editor, an eminent journalist who has won over 60 journalism
prizes in his 43 years of covering the Indian countryside.



PARI, a multimedia storehouse about the everyday lives
of everyday people, is a living journal and an archive. An initiative of the
CounterMedia Trust, it started out with less than a dozen people in December
2014. It began as a rural journalism site and has grown to include an online
library of official reports and rare documents on rural India, arts from and
about rural life, and an education initiative. PARI generates original field
stories in the form of text, photographs, illustrations, audio, videos and
documentaries. They cover the lives of ordinary Indians and encompass labour,
livelihood, craft, crisis, stories, songs, and more.

The seeds for PARI were sown in Sainath’s
classrooms where, in his 35 years as an educator, he has trained over 2,000
journalists with a strong foundation in the ethics of reporting. This helped
aspiring journalists, including me, to contextualise inequalities and
injustices, and apply our conscience as a prism in the professional world.



“Through the years, one thing has remained
constant—the idealism that has drawn each of us to PARI, all inspired by the
compelling stories of rural Indians,” says Namita Waikar, PARI’s Managing
Editor. PARI has been an ‘oxygen bar’ for journalists feeling choked by
mainstream emissions.



Archiving
the Forgotten



PARI’s stories are situated in a point of
time—we are journalists after all—yet timeless, because it’s also an archive.
In an ideal world, PARI would not be necessary, but as Sainath says, “PARI, 25
to 50 years hence, will be the only database that Indians can turn to in order
to learn anything about how people lived and worked in the rural India of our
times.”



When the mainstream media was inundated with
visuals of the Delhi flood in July 2023, we wrote about what they left out—the
cost of displaced <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/who-drowned-delhi/">farmers rebuilding their homes</a> and
livelihoods. Ordinary people and their lives—structurally complex, emotionally
tenuous—are at the centre of the narrative. These are not stories from a
faraway land of mythical people. Until a few generations ago, every urban
Indian lived in a village. PARI’s goal is to create a bridge of empathy between
its readers and subjects—an English-speaking urban Indian is granted insight
into the lived lives of rural counterparts; a Hindi-reading farmer can learn
about other farmers in different parts of the country; young people are
introduced to history not taught in textbooks; researchers delve into vanishing
crafts and livelihoods.



Reporting for PARI has helped me, as a journalist, to
localise, immerse, and understand larger development processes rather than
simply snapping one-off events without context. I was born and raised in New
Delhi but it was only through research for PARI, as part of a nation-wide
series on climate change, that I learnt that 3 kms from where I live, tortoises
and Gangetic dolphins used to frolic in the Yamuna river until 40 years ago! I
referred to the Delhi Gazetteer (1912), interviewed Yamuna’s last remaining <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/big-city-small-farmers-and-a-dying-river/">farmers</a> and <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/when-yamunas-dead-fish-will-be-fresher/">fisherfolk</a>, and identified the links between
the present and the past so that I could pose questions for the future. I went
back to report on their <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/in-the-capital-this-is-how-farmers-are-treated/">displacement for development</a> post pandemic,
and the destruction caused by the <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/who-drowned-delhi/">2023 flood</a>. This helped me develop a level of
expertise on the issue as opposed to the ‘parachute reporting’ (coming in only
during a crisis event without connection to the community) which mainstream
reporting often demands. You come away better informed as a journalist, with
some confidence about the issues, and the ability to discuss them at relevant
panels and discussions—thus taking the stories and issues further and wider.

Many of the people in PARI’s stories are those
who suffer economic and social trauma at various levels and layers. It’s a
human need to be seen and heard. The people PARI reports about are active
participants in their own stories. When I reported on the Yamuna farmers in
English, I shared the Hindi versions of my work with them, and received their
feedback. People don’t owe us their stories because we are journalists; we have
to earn their trust for them to share with us.



Art, like journalism, aims to keep a society
in conversation with itself. So, PARI embraces creative writing too. “Sometimes
poetry is the only space where one can speak the truth. PARI gives space to
simple, poignant and raw poems that often come from the heartland of rural
India, in its many tongues,” says Pratishtha Pandya, PARI’s poetry editor. As a
journalist, I have written <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/infinite-longing-demarcated-bodies/">poetry</a> to capture stories that weren’t suited
to a traditional <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/they-grope-me-when-they-give-my-medicines/">report</a>.



A
Public Good



Journalism, as a function of democracy,
necessitates fact-checking, editorial standards, and telling the truth about
power, all of which are built into its process. But these principles are
getting lost in the burgeoning of social media even as newer forms of
journalism take shape. Smaller organisations and freelance journalists can
today tell stories on platforms like YouTube, but having the resources to go
out and report, build audiences, and earn viably remain challenges.



“PARI and its journalists are safeguarding the fourth
pillar. We are keeping alive the legacy of Mirat-Ul-Akhbar [journal founded by
reformer Raja Rammohan Roy in 1822 that critically examined the British
policies of the time], Kesari [brought out by freedom fighter Lokmanya Bal
Gangadhar Tilak in 1881], and others that we got from the independence
struggle, on meagre finance, supporting ourselves by doing other side gigs,”
says Siddharth Adelkar, PARI’s Tech Editor.

As a non-profit journalism outfit, PARI relies
on public donations, project-related funds from foundations, CSR funds,
donations from the trustees themselves, and volunteer labour in areas such as
tech. PARI’s 63 journalism awards have brought in at least five lakh rupees.
While mainstream media remains celebrity and advertising centric, increasingly
kowtowing to the ruling establishment, PARI doesn’t run advertisements, or
accept funding that comes with interfering riders. Ideally, PARI should be
completely crowd-funded, answerable only to its audience.



The content is creative commons; there are no
pay-walls; and people can freely reprint content with due acknowledgment. All
articles get translated into 15 Indian languages, including English, by
PARIBhasha, the translations team. “Language is the vessel that carries
diversity. I look at translation from the lens of social justice. India being a
multilingual region, it’s on us to disseminate knowledge through translation.
PARI’s translation programme is based on the principle of democratisation of
languages as opposed to having one language that would rule the world’s most
complex and diverse linguistic region,” says Smita Khator, Ediitor,
PARI-Bhasha.



PARI is also focused on creating material that
is used and created by students and teachers. It’s <a href="https://pari.education/what-is-a-pari-education/">education arm</a> engages with school and college students in
the metros, showing them that a global citizen is not only one who is fluent in
a foreign language and apprised of world events but someone rooted in realities
30-50-100 kms from them where people most likely speak a different Indian
dialect. “We see students’ stories [published on PARI] as examples of PARI’s
pedagogy of experiential learning, pushing kids to challenge norms, equipping
them to ask questions: Why are people forced to migrate? Why do women workers
in tea estates not have access to nearby toilets? A young girl asks why her
relatives and neighbours—women in Uttarakhand—are still treated as ‘impure’
during their monthly period; she asks young boys in her class if they will do
the same,” shares Priti David, PARI’s Executive Editor.



Rural India holds many unique and diverse
stories, of people, languages, professions, arts and more. PARI is a ‘textbook
for the future’, documenting and archiving these stories even as they are
changing and disappearing, making them accessible in several languages, and
taking rural journalism to classrooms. PARI aims to ultimately situate a fellow
in every one of India’s 95 historical regions to tell the tales of “the
everyday people who actually keep the substance, the heart and soul of the
country alive,” as Adelkar puts it. For us at the PARI-var, this isn’t just
journalism. It’s a practice to be, and stay, human.



The original version of
this essay was commissioned by Dark ‘n Light and originally published on their <a href="https://darknlight.com/projects/personal-essay/whose-story-is-it/?fbclid=PAAabJ226A571VWq6YrNJ4139_613kIuE9TijYvZKctDVKMdQDXkpSw532ij0">website</a> in December 2023.

Whose story is it?

یہ کس کی کہانی ہے؟

யாரின் கதை இது?

ਸਾਡੀਆਂ ਕਹਾਣੀਆਂ ਦੇ ਨਾਇਕ ਆਖ਼ਰ ਕੌਣ ਲੋਕ ਹਨ?

ଏ କାହାଣୀ କାହାର?

ആരുടെ കഥയാണിത്?

ಇದು ಯಾರ ಕತೆ?

हमारी कहानियों में बोलता वह किरदार कौन है?

આખરે આ વાર્તાઓ છે કોની?

ये काकर कहिनी आय?

पारी केकर कहानी कह रहल बा?

কার কাহিনি, কে শোনায়?

কাৰ কাহিনী এয়া?

At present, we can only accept donations in Indian rupees by Indian citizens. All donations made to the CounterMedia Trust are eligible for exemption under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act, 1961. Here is a copy of our exemption certificate.


India is bigger than New Delhi. And people need to know more about the rest of this vast nation.


Younger, media-saturated generations are growing up knowing little about their country, but a lot about the elites of a few metros and towns. For a narrowly-owned, commercially-driven media, the dumbing down of a nation is part of standard operating procedure. The last available data of the Centre for Media Studies (CMS, Delhi) show us that reports from New Delhi account for 66 per cent of news on the front pages of major dailies. The CMS data also found that just about 0.24 per cent of front page news came out of rural India. The TV channels are not much better.PARI exists to change that.We are a non-profit organisation. We publish under creative commons, and do not charge readers a subscription fee or put-up advertisements. Nothing is behind a paywall and we are completely free-to-access by anyone. We guard our independence and receive no direct grants from governments and corporations, nor any funding that could dictate our content. So, we are dependent on volunteer labour, donations from individuals, foundations and institutions that see value in independent and free media.PARI is changing the way Indian journalism reports and documents the rural.India is more than the elite of a few metros and towns. We report on rural lives and livelihoods, languages, communities, migrants and more. We need your help to pull off this most ambitious of Indian journalistic endeavours. The scale of this effort costs money. Donate generously - and spread the word about PARI.&nbsp;

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Whose story is it?

An essay on PARI and the critical role it plays

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