The Talk
PARI
People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) is a multimedia, free access digital space – the only website wholly dedicated to rural India – that is both, a contemporary journal and a living archive. In a media driven by celebrity coverage, PARI covers the everyday lives of everyday people. It’s the one place you can learn about the agrarian crisis from those worst affected by it.
Building a national legacy treasure is also PARI’s mandate – the only site recording the lives and testimonies, for instance of India’s last living freedom fighters. The site hosts the largest database of songs composed and sung by poor women in Indian languages. It reportsand documents the lives of 833 million rural Indians: their skills, labour, livelihoods, fears and hopes, and their changing lives. It does this in up to 13 languages.
In the past 30 months, PARI has won 16 journalism awards, including some of the most prestigious national and global ones. Besides this, 15 PARI films were selected for screening at the first South Asian Short Film Festival (Nanda, Kolkota) in 2018. No other multimedia journalism website has achieved this. It has done all of this independent of government or corporations, raising its money mostly from volunteer labour and individual donations.
At Manthan, Sainath, the founder, showcased PARI.
This event was in collaboration with Annapurna International School of Film+Media.