Back To The Grass Roots

As is the case with most talks by journalist Palagummi Sainath, the multipurpose hall at New Delhi’s India International Centre was packed. A majority of the latecomers sat on the floor or waited in the wings, some spilling out into the hallway and a few on the stairs of the stage. We made our way to the far end of the stage and sat down with others, jostling for breathing room among a motley group of students and rookie journalists. We’d made it just in time as Sainath began his lecture-cum-demo on “Journalism from below in the digital age”.

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On 20^th December, 2014, Sainath – a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award and more recently the World Media Summit Award – launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). What PARI is attempting to do is unlike anything that exists today. It seeks to create an ever-expanding online archive of audio, video, text and any other form of records of “everyday people doing everyday things” — a chronicling of rural India.

Of course, if you’re sitting on a couch with chips falling on to your laptop keyboard, Sainath, understandably, isn’t interested.

The project is a massive and ambitious endeavour in anthropological rigour. The website contains several photographs, clippings and write-ups. Most of the work has been done by Sainath as well as a few of his colleagues and 300-plus volunteers, all of whom were self-funded. The website aims to be a source for all things rural, with reports published by government as well as unofficial sources.

It is pertinent to note that Sainath was the only Rural Affairs Editor in a national daily, The Hindu, for the last decade, before resigning last year. This despite the fact that rural India holds a wealth of stories, many of which can help steer policy changes, effect the delivery of justice and, most importantly, where 70 per cent of our population resides.

Now, before you say all rural reporting is just about harping on the dying farmers of Vidarbha, let me stop you there. Even though it is a significant part of it, rural reporting isn’t limited to farmer suicides and agrarian crises. It also deals with untold stories of adivasis, dalits, their lives and their hardships, it deals with folk traditions and the increasingly desperate state that they find themselves in, it also deals with “jugaad” — that inventive streak unique to Indians and Indian-ness. In Sainath’s words: “Rural India isn’t somewhere you go to find stories, stories kick you in the face.”

Over the course of the three hours spent explaining what PARI was all about, Sainath went through the workings of the website, the various categories and the innovative work being done to archive the endless expanse of rural India. Though there’s bound to be some editorial intervention to uphold the quality of the content, Sainath emphasised that the kind of work being done by PARI can be done by almost anyone. For example, he showed the audience an audio-visual report on “The Green Army” of Kerala by a 19-year-old former intern.

Sainath also mentioned the concept of PARI fellowships, currently only for a small number of fellows but which will expand to a team of 50 people placed in regions around the country in order to generate new content on a regular basis. This, expectedly, piqued the interest of many in the audience with one journalist covering the event even getting up to ask if there were any openings.

We caught up with Sainath after the demo on PARI to talk about his new venture, bringing the focus back on rural India and holding the middle ground of “hope” between fake optimism and cynical pessimism.

Despite having been a print journalist for the past three decades, Sainath displayed an enthusiasm for the digital medium and the potential it offers. The ability to archive rural India through audio, video, text and images as opposed to the conventional restrictions of print seemed to excite Sainath.

When asked what he hoped to achieve through PARI, Sainath stated unequivocally that, at present, he saw PARI just as “a vehicle for good journalism.” Still, he refused to place any restrictions on the scope for PARI going forward, “Why limit PARI?” he asked with incredulity when questioned by a member of the audience. Whether PARI lives up to Sainath’s ambitions for it or the public’s expectations of it, one thing it has already managed is to reignite the conversation about rural reporting in Indian news media or the lack thereof.