People's Archive of Rural India

The People's Archive of Rural India (PARI /ˈpɑːri/) is a multimedia 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 book Everybody Loves a Good Drought and winner of over 50 national and international awards.
PARI focuses on rural journalism and publishes stories, videos and photo stories in numerous categories, including, Farming and its Crisis, Adivasis, Dalits, Women, Healthcare, The Rural in the Urban and Resource Conflicts. It showcases the occupational, linguistic and cultural diversity of India, and aims to publish stories with detail and authenticity, which provide readers, listeners and viewers with a context to derive information and knowledge from.
PARI stories are usually translated into various Indian languages by a team of translators and translation editors across India, most of them volunteers. PARI regularly publishes in 10 languages besides the default English.
Additionally, PARI hosts a free online Library with a growing collection of reports, surveys and other material relevant to understanding and contextualising rural India. And the site attempts to map the facial diversity across India through its unique FACES section.
N. Ram, former editor-in-chief and publisher of The Hindu referred to PARI as "…one of the brightest spots of public-spirited journalism” at the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture on May 3, 2016.
PARI is a journalism website and a “living, breathing archive” – it is not a hard news website, but aims to be topical in its coverage of rural India. It publishes stories in around 26 categories which include Things We Do, Things We Make, Women, Adivasis, Musafir, Environment, Resource Conflicts, The Wild, Healthcare, The Rural in the Urban and others.
In several instances, PARI's stories are published as an ongoing series. A few of these are:
This series contains PARI's stories of ordinary Indians such as stranded migrant workers, farmers, sanitation workers, pastoral nomads, artisans, construction labourers, rural schoolteachers and students, and others, who were severely impacted by the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown that began in March 2020. This ongoing series, documenting and recording people's stories and struggles beyond the lockdown too, covers over 20 states and 35 regions. These include articles done from the field, multimedia stories, photo essays and videos, as well as documents, reports and laws relevant to the pandemic-lockdown period in the PARI Library.
Included in this series are also songs, poems and paintings inspired by the great migrant journeys, or as artistic expressions on the distress of the lockdown and pandemic.
PARI has extensively covered farmers’ rallies and movements across the country, including the protests against the three farm laws that were passed by the Indian government in September 2020. The protesting farmers have said that these laws will destroy their livelihoods by offering large corporates even greater power over farming, and by undermining the main forms of state support to the cultivator.
The website also contains numerous reports on the Nashik to Mumbai march in March 2018, when tens of thousands of farmers demanded loan waivers, better crop prices, forest rights, and other measures. PARI also covered the landmark Kisan Mukti Morcha in Delhi on November 29–30, 2018, which brought together farmers, labourers and others from across India, demanding a 21-day session of Parliament to focus on the agrarian crisis to cover bills on debt and remunerative prices, the water crisis, land reforms, the rights of women, Dalit and Adivasi farmers, and more.
This series focuses on understanding and writing about who these farmers are – as individuals, as communities – besides their identities as farmers.
This series is a PARI-UNDP collaboration with articles on climate change from “multiple climate and agro-ecological zones across the country, through the voices and lived experiences of ordinary Indians.” These include stories on depleting coral reefs and native insect species, the experience of seaweed harvesters, changing temperature patterns, monoculture cash crops and human-wildlife conflict.
This ongoing PARI series in partnership with the Population Foundation of India, aims to document the voices and stories of women's reproductive health across rural India. The stories revolve around “the stigma around infertility, the emphasis on female sterilisation, the lack of ‘male engagement’ in family planning, inadequate rural healthcare systems that too are out of reach for many, unqualified medical practitioners and dangerous childbirths, discrimination due to menstruation, the preference for sons – and more. Stories that speak of a wide range of health-related prejudices and practices, people and communities, gender and rights, and the everyday struggles and occasional small victories of women in rural India.”
PARI has an exclusive category dedicated to India’s last living freedom fighters, such as Captain Bhau, who led an anti-British uprising that resulted in the formation of a provisional government in Satara, Maharashtra, in 1943; and Salihan, an Adivasi woman from Odisha’s Nuapada who single-handedly took on an armed British officer in 1930, when she was 16.
“We had fought for independence and freedom, but our contribution was forgotten,” said Captain Bhau (Ramchandra Sripati Lad), who led an anti-British uprising in Satara, Maharashtra, in 1943. With this film and article about me and my fellow soldiers, P. Sainath and PARI have revived the memory of prati sarkar [provisional government] and how it fought for people.”
This is a collection of over 100,000 ovi – couplets sung by the women of rural Maharashtra over generations, while toiling at the grindmill at home and performing other household tasks. These songs yield insights into village life and culture; gender, patriarchy, class, and caste issues; religion; and various contemporary social and political concerns. PARI aims to archive this collection through recordings, videos, transcripts, translations and stories.
PARI’s stories on demonetisation – when the Indian government, in November 2016, outlawed 86 per cent of the country’s currency – cover its effects on devastated farmers, landless labourers, beedi-rollers, migrant workers, shop owners and many others across rural India.
This PARI series covers stories about people denied rations, disability pensions, MGNREGA wages, scholarships and more, because of misspelt names, botched biometrics, and other such glitches in their Aadhaar cards.
PARI Anthologies are collections of subject-specific stories, such as ‘Everyday lives in Ladakh and Kashmir’; ‘Train stories from rural India’; ‘The handlers of India’s human waste’; ‘Into the precarious world of India's weavers’ and ‘Cattle stories from the countryside’.
PARI aims to document the country's fast-changing countryside. Rural India is extremely diverse in occupations, arts and crafts, culture, literature, legend, transportation, and in other fields. But as the Indian countryside rushes through an extremely painful transformation, many of these features disappear, leaving us poorer. There are, for instance, probably more schools and styles of weaving in India than in any other single nation. Many of these traditional weaving communities face real collapse, which will rob the world of some of its greatest gifts. Similarly, there are other occupations in rural India which are experiencing decline, such as potters, toy-makers and toddy-tappers. Much of what makes the countryside unique could be gone in 20–30 years. Without any systematic record, visual or oral of this incredible diversity. With rural India losing worlds and voices of which future generations will know little or nothing, PARI aims to be a living journal, an archive and a textbook for the future.
Visible Work, Invisible Women takes viewers around an entire exhibition of original photographs depicting the contribution that rural women make to the national economy. All the photographs were shot by P. Sainath across 10 Indian states between 1993 and 2002. Four sets of the physical version of this exhibition have been seen by over 700,000 viewers in India alone since 2002. Its display venues have included bus and railway stations, factory gates, mass rallies of agricultural and other labourers, schools, colleges and universities. The entire body of work is online on PARI.
The PARI library is an online compendium of publicly accessible documents and data on rural India, with sections such as climate change, health, gender, laws, agriculture and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's writings. The library archives reports, journal articles, surveys, laws, reviewed research articles as well as literature and historical writings, for students, researchers and other readers to access for free. The PARI Health Archive is a collection of over 120 resources on health, nutrition, COVID-19 and related topics.
PARI's FACES project is a record of the facial and occupational diversity of India. It documents the faces of adults and children – along with their age, occupation and other details – from various blocks and districts of India.
PARI Education, launched on August 3, 2020, brings PARI stories to classrooms across India – as teaching resources, by aiding project work, and by familiarising teachers with rural issues. It aims to sensitise a new generation to lives and livelihoods in rural India. The PARI Education co-website also serves as a platform for stories, videos, photo essays and comics created by students. PARI's collaborations so far (since August 2018) with over 70 educational institutions include conducting classroom sessions, looking for ways to engage in the curriculum, working with teachers to use PARI stories in the classroom, co-designing courses which incorporate PARI material.
PARI is the first media website in India to publish its articles in several Indian languages, including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu.
On October 31, 2020, PARI, in collaboration with independent publishing house Karadi Tales, launched a series of children's books based on PARI stories from different parts of rural India. The books are No Nonsense Nandhini by Aparna Karthikeyan, No Ticket, Will Travel by Subuhi Jiwani, House of Uncommons by Vishaka George, Coming Home by Priti David and A Big Splash by Nivedha Ganesh.
The People's Archive of Rural India aims to position a PARI Fellow in every single one of the country's roughly 100 regions, most of which are untouched by the ‘national’ media. The Fellows could be reporters, writers, filmmakers, photographers and everyday residents of the regions. The network of Fellows that PARI builds will also reflect the social composition of the country. Half of the nearly 100 Fellows will be women. And Dalit journalists, Adivasi journalists and those from the minorities will also be represented in a fair manner. Each PARI Fellow works on a specific region for a year, spending at least three months full-time in fieldwork amongst the region's people and communities. PARI has had 24 Fellows since 2015, who have reported stories from over 30 regions. Some of the PARI Fellows are – Anubha Bhonsle (2015 & 2019), Purusottam Thakur (2015), Arpita Chakrabarty (2016), Ratna Bharali Talukdar (2016), Ritayan Mukherjee (2016), Urvashi Sarkar (2016), Bhasha Singh (2017), Parth M. N. (2017), Rahul M. (2017), M. Palani Kumar (2019) and Sanket Jain (2019).
Additionally, various PARI stories have had a wide range of impacts. Some of these are:
PARI has won 31 awards since its launch in December 2014. WAN-IFRA's South Asian Digital Media Awards in the category 'Best Special Project for COVID-19', the Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity, Prem Bhatia Award for Journalism on Environment and Development issues, the Ramnath Goenka Award and the Silver Lotus (Rajat Kamal) at the 63rd National Film Awards are some of the accolades that PARI has received. The full list so far:
South Asian Short Film Festival 2018 and 2019
For the South Asian Short Film Festival in 2018, 15 PARI films were selected – 13 for the Competition Documentary category, and 2 for the Official Panorama Viewing category. These films ranged in duration from 6 to 18 minutes and were shot in Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Marathi, Malayalam, Ladakhi, Manipuri and Tamil. Some of the selected films were Tussar: the crumbling cocoon by Shreya Katyayini, Mending boats with music by V. Sasikumar, The fading weaves of Duajhar by Purusottam Thakur, Ima Keithel: every day is women's day by Anubha Bhonsle and others and Threadbare in Santipur by Sinchita Maji.
The South Asian Short Film Festival in 2019 selected five PARI films/videos for its Competition Documentary category. The films were shot in Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Manipuri and Hindi. The selected films were Ganpati Yadav's gripping life cycle by Sinchita Maji, Possessed by his art, a Bahurupi transforms by Ankan Roy and others, I feel so happy to see the paddy growing by Vishaka George and others, Into the chakshangs of Imphal by Anubha Bhonsle and others and Farming doesn't give us our sustenance by Subuhi Jiwani.