People's Archive of Rural India

People's Archive of Rural India
	"The everday lives of everday people."
languages	Surface English
editorial staff	P. Sainath
On-line	2014
https://www.ruralindiaonline.org/

The People's Archive of Rural India ( PARI ) is a non-profit digital archive in which audio, video, image and journalistic material on the life and interests of the Indian rural population is collected and made publicly accessible under a Creative Commons license. The privately funded website was founded in 2014 by Palagummi Sainath , a well-known journalist and former The Hindu editor in the rural affairs department.

The aim is to document the professional, linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Indian subcontinent and to allow people to have their say who receive little or no attention in the reporting of the urban media.

Similar to Wikipedia, PARI is operated as a joint project. It is coordinated by a small editorial team and mostly filled with content by a network of more than a thousand Indian and foreign volunteers who do research on site. The contents of the database are translated into English and up to ten Indian languages, including Assamese , Urdu , Telugu , Hindi , Malayalam , Kannada , Marathi , Bengali and Tamil , and then checked by volunteers.

With its focus on the documentation of rural life, its economy and crises, PARI is a unique project in India. The platform reports in detail on the Indian agricultural crisis and documents its consequences for rural life.

background

Since the Indian economic policy of the last 10 to 20 years has triggered an agra crisis of unprecedented proportions, which is driving millions of Indians from the countryside to the cities in search of work, PARI founder Sainath sees many unique rural professions, lifestyles and cultural peculiarities in the next 20 threatened with extinction up to 30 years. Although two-thirds of the Indian population live in rural areas and are affected by these problems, most of the Indian media reports to the audience of the richest five percent of the population in the urban centers. PARI has therefore set itself the goal of documenting the great linguistic, cultural and also professional diversity of India with its more than 780 languages - most of which are spoken in rural areas - as extensively as possible. In order to guarantee independent reporting, PARI does not accept funds from government institutions or companies. In order to save costs and to make the information accessible to the general public in the future, a digital platform was chosen for the archive rather than a physical one.

Content creation and fellowship system

The contributions to the People's Archive of Rural India are made by volunteers, students, journalists and PARI fellows. The winners include Madhusree Mukerjee , Priyanka Kakodkar, Anubha Bhonsle , Shalini Singh, Chitrangada Choudhury, Jaideep Hardikar and Purusottam Thaku. PARI awards scholarships to selected fellows for their work in rural regions if they report on a specific region for a year and spend at least three months of it directly among the residents. In the future, PARI plans to report from all 95 regions of the country with at least one fellow each , since supraregional, commercial media only cover seven or eight of the regions (as of 2016).

The coverage on PARI includes detailed reports on the agricultural economy and the devastating agricultural and water crisis in the country, which Sainath has created over 30 years of journalistic work, articles and documentations by other authors on a variety of topics, including dying rural lifestyles, the misery of Farmers and the environmental crisis in central India, suicides by farmers in Maharashtra, systematic environmental destruction through illegal mining, the life of indigenous inhabitants in Orissa and Chhattisgarh or the dying Saimar language with only 7 speakers.

In addition to the publication of such reports on current events and problems, PARI acts as a database in which historical, difficult to access or rare works are collected that are of importance for rural India. Under the heading "Resources" you will find z. B. the government report "Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector" of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector from 2007 and the now out of print book Famine Over Bengal by the Hindu correspondent TG Narayanan from 1944, one of his Zeit breakthrough eyewitness account of the 1943 Bengal famine . PARI strives to host all content itself as far as possible instead of just linking it.

effect

A report on the post office in Pithoragarh went viral the day it was published, was shared by several well-known figures, and eventually caught the attention of Union Minister for Communication and Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad . As a result, the town finally got its own post office within four days. PARI reports have also been picked up by well-known print and online media such as Economic & Political Weekly , Scroll.in, BBC Hindi , Times of India , Youth ki Awaaz, Saddhahaq.com, SunTV, and Mathrubhumi Weekly .

Awards

Laadli Media and Advertising Award: Best Investigative Story Award 2016 , for the report by the PARI Fellow Purusottam Thakur about a girls' school
At the 63rd National Film Awards 2016 , the film "Weaves of Maheshwar" by PARI fellows Nidhi Kamath and Keya Vaswani won the Rajat Kamal (silver lotus) award in the Best Promotional Film category.
Praful Bidwai Memorial Award 2016 for PARI's documentation work in rural India. The award was presented by the well-known historian and intellectual Romila Thapar. About PARI he said: “Bold in conceptualization 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 ”.