PARI – the precious decade

It’s ten years since PARI was officially launched on December 20, 2014.

Our biggest achievement? We’re still here. An independent journalism website, surviving, even thriving in a media environment where corporate power is king. PARI now publishes daily in 15 languages. The main activity of a Trust that was formed with zero corpus, no government funds – sought or given – at all. No direct corporate grants or investments, no advertising revenue (by choice) and no subscription fee that would exclude large numbers of the very people we want to have reading, watching, listening to PARI. But built by a huge network of committed volunteers – journalists, techies, artists, academics, and more, with a significant share of skilled but free volunteer labour. And built on generous donations from the public, the trustees and from Foundations that have never sought to curb PARI’s independence.

Steered now by a sincere and super-diligent staff, the People’s Archive of Rural India is the one website that tries to report systematically from all of India’s roughly 95 natural-physical or historically evolved regions. The one journalism site wholly dedicated to rural India, to its close to 900 million people, their lives and livelihoods, their cultures, their close to 800 distinct languages. Committed to covering the everyday lives of everyday people. To telling the stories of nearly a billion human beings – since we strongly cover the very large numbers of rural migrants in urban India.

From the beginning, the founders were clear that we wanted to build a PARI that was both, a journalism site and a living, breathing archive. And that we wanted a site that practised a journalism informed not by the stale doctrinal cliches of a corporate-defined ‘professional’ media. But by the infusion of the rigour, knowledge and strengths of the humanities, sciences and importantly the social sciences. From Day One, we brought together not only highly experienced journalists on board, but also very knowledgeable non-journalists from these other streams.

That was and is a recipe for confusion, conflict, misunderstanding, argument (sometimes bitter), and eventually – extraordinary achievement. For all streams understood and agreed on this one principle: it will not be our voices that dominate content. It will be those of ordinary, everyday Indians. Our field protocols instruct all reporters to ensure it is people’s voices, not their own, that dominate the story. That we tell stories, and not issue bulletins or academic or bureaucratic reports. To the extent that we can, we even try to get farmers, forest dwellers, workers, weavers, fisherfolk, and people from myriad other livelihoods – to tell, even write their own stories. Perhaps even sing them.

And what we have on the site today – in terms of just text articles, is over 2,000 full-length stories, quite a few of them in prize-winning series, which we bring to readers in all our 15 languages. Stories of hundreds of different livelihoods (some of them in danger of being wiped out), farmers’ protests, climate change, gender and caste-related injustice and violence, music and song archives, the poetry of resistance, the photography of protest.

We have a PARI Education section that has hosted some 230 stories by student reporters. PARI Education has proved a hit – and is in great demand – in hundreds of schools, colleges and universities, both among students and teachers. It has also held innumerable workshops, training sessions and lectures in more educational institutions than I can count. Alongside, PARI’s social media efforts reach out to a newer generation. Our Instagram page is a spectacular success, with 120,000 followers.

We have a creative writing and art section that has won high respect. The creative section has hosted some extraordinary talent. From folk poets and singers, to simply brilliant illustrators, to the unique (and first ever) Archive of Adivasi Children’s Art.

PARI hosts folk songs from diverse regions of the country – including the unrivalled Grindmill Songs Project that has gained international recognition. We have probably the biggest collection of folk music on any Indian site.

In ten years, PARI has published an astonishing array of stories and videos from and on the Covid-19 period, on healthcare, migrations, vanishing skills and occupations. The list is endless.

In these ten years, PARI has won 80 prizes, awards, honours. That includes 22 international awards. Yes, only 77 of these 80 are presently mentioned on our website – because three can only be announced when the organisers of the awards give us the go ahead. That means we have, across a decade, averaged an award every 45 days. None of the major ‘mainstream’ publications even come anywhere close to that level of achievement.

Why a ‘People’s Archive?’

Historically – contrary to the romanticised perceptions of the educated classes – archives and the ancient libraries were not repositories of knowledge for all people. They were (and most remain) elitist and exclusionist. (Funnily enough, this was something The Game of Thrones got right. Samwell Tarly struggles to get to the forbidden textbooks secreted away in an out-of-access room. Books that in fact save the day in the battle against the Army of the Dead).

The ancient libraries of Alexandria, Nalanda and other great repositories of knowledge were never open to ordinary people.

In other words, archives often functioned as sites of state control over and censorship of sensitive information from which the mass of people are excluded. India and China fought a border war in 1962 – 62 years ago. To this day, we still cannot access vital documents relating to that conflict. It took decades of battles by the journalists who filmed the aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki to retrieve the footage from the US military. The Pentagon had withheld and appropriated that footage for training American soldiers to fight in future nuclear wars.

Further, there are many archives dubbed ‘private collections’ and online libraries/ archives also privately owned that deny access to the public even if their content is of huge relevance and importance to the people.

Hence, the need for a People’s Archive. One that is not controlled by or accountable to either governments or corporations. A journalism unfettered by private gain. One that is accountable to the people we cover. To those marginalised in both society and media.

Surviving in the present media universe is much harder than you might believe. We have a PARI community that is always coming up with new, unique ideas which we know we just have to do. And we have set off in pursuit of one or the other such idea, often with little preparation. Let’s add one more language. Let’s map India’s facial diversity – bringing in photographs of everyday Indians from every single district (now nearly 800) of the country. Heck, let’s make that every single block of every single district.

We now have 3,235 FACES up there on the site from hundreds of blocks and districts and we regularly add to them. We have some 526 videos, too, on the PARI website.

Entirely apart from those beautiful FACES, PARI has published more than 20,000 wonderful photographs (we are yet to update the exact number). We pride ourselves on being a visually driven website. And proudly claim to this platform being home to some of the finest photographers and illustrators in India.

Let’s expand the extraordinary PARI Library – which does not just loan you books, it gives them to you for free. You can download and printout anything we have in our Library.

Let’s create the best collection of stories on weavers in all parts of the country. Let’s do climate change stories that are actually stories. That capture the process foregrounding the voices and lived experience of those on the frontlines of its impact.  Not a lumping of scientific and technical reports that convince readers that this is not a subject they can handle. We do carry those scientific-technical reports in the PARI Library – but with summaries and factsheets that enable and aid anyone to understand what they’re saying. The Library is home to some 900 reports each of which is accompanied by those summaries and factoids. The kind of effort this requires is stupendous.

Perhaps our greatest achievement, besides lasting it out for a decade, is in our multi-linguality. We know of no journalism website in the world that presents its full text content in 15 languages. There are organisations like the BBC that might have output in up to 40, but there is no parity between languages. Their Tamil service would carry only a fraction of their English programming. In PARI, if an article appears in one language, it must appear in all 15. And we invite more and more reporters to write in their mother tongue, and our multilingual editors edit and process their work first in that language.

Our giant translations team, Indian language colleagues, our PARIBhasha group, is something we are truly proud of. What they do takes a mind-boggling amount of work of unimaginable complexity. And this group has given us close to 16,000 translations these past years.

All this is apart from the most challenging project on Endangered Languages that PARI is pioneering. With some 225 Indian languages dying in the past 50 years, documenting and helping preserve the many others on the brink is one of the most important tasks before us.

Our work in the past ten years has seen us cover 381 districts across 33 States and Union Territories. And this body of work has come from and been processed by over 1,400 contributors including reporters, writers, poets, photographers, film makers, translators, illustrators, editors across mediums, and hundreds of interns at PARI.

Alas, all these activities I’ve only cursorily mentioned, cost many times the amount of money we have at one time. But we dash ahead regardless. Trusting that if our work is good enough – and we know it is – the effort will get at least some of the financial support it needs. PARI’s annual expenditure in our first year of existence was Rs. 12 lakhs. Now, it is just a little under Rs. 3 crores. But on that we produce output worth many times that amount. An output unmatched in its archival importance to the country.

Yes, surviving these ten years was a great achievement. But we really, really need your support if we must continue to build and strengthen at the pace we have this past decade. Anyone who keeps to our mandate and guidelines can write, make films, take photographs, record music for PARI.

Perhaps in 25 years from now, surely in the next 50, anyone wanting to know of how ordinary Indians lived, worked, created, produced, ate, sang, danced and more…PARI is the only place they can turn to. In 2021, the US Library of Congress recognised PARI as a vital resource and sought permission to archive us – which we were delighted to give.

PARI, which charges no fee, which is a free-access-to-public multimedia digital space, and which engages with and captures the stories of the great processes of our time, is today a national resource. Help us make it a national treasure.