Seeking media PARI-ty in rural India
Two-thirds of India lives in rural communities. But you wouldn’t know that from the national media. The People’s Archive of Rural India aims to fill that gap writes Shobha S V.
Here’s the challenge in reporting much of rural India: How do you capture a society — or multiple interlinked diverse societies — in dramatic change? How to critique what should be discarded? How to celebrate the uniqueness that should be preserved?
About 65 percent of India’s population is rural, yet news about the communities who live and work there rarely make it to the front pages of newspapers. The challenge embraced by PARI, the People’s Archive of Rural India is making voices from rural India heard.
Recognised with Asia’s prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007 for “his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness,” Palagummi Sainath was India’s only Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu until 2014. When that newspaper wound down the role, Sainath went on to start People’s Archive of Rural India, a non-profit media organization that documents everyday lives of rural Indians through articles, photo-essays, and audio and video stories. PARI is a part of a small group of digital initiatives focused on rural India, that includes Gaon Connection, Khabar Lahariya and the Village Square
PARI doesn’t aim to be a hard news website. Instead, it focuses on being contemporary and topical in covering the important issues of rural India. PARI’s approach is “slow news” — stories that provide detail, authenticity and understanding, as well as “context to derive information and knowledge from,” according to Sainath.
Some of PARI’s ongoing journalism projects include a climate change reporting project in association with UNDP and published in eight languages, and “The Grindmills Songs Project”, a database that documents more than 100,000 songs sung by women of rural Maharashtra in western India. Nearly 40,000 of the songs have been translated into English and French from the original Marathi.
Reach and Impact
Sainath says PARI’s target audience is anyone interested in rural India, but they also make a conscious effort to reach a diverse audience through translations and re-publications. Lack of funding however, makes it hard to scale. Sharmila Joshi, PARI’s executive editor says people from rural India access the content through translations, “We have around 4000 translated articles across different languages — Urdu, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali and Kannada.”
Mainstream publications as well as smaller media pick up stories from PARI on a regular basis, like in the case of Nashik-Mumbai farmers march. Their work serves as an important source for researchers as well as policy makers; for example. one article was cited in the Aadhar judgement by the Supreme Court of India. They have also received around 20 awards — both Indian and international for their work with the most recent one being the prestigious Prem Bhatia award for outstanding journalism for their reportage on the Covid-19 pandemic.
The mentorship programme
PARI tries to subvert the standard newsroom approach of depending on professionals and staff journalists by focusing on diversity and social representation. “We try to create journalists and journalism among sections long excluded from the media,” Sainath explained.
It runs the PARI Fellowship, a year-long mentorship programme. The fellows reflect India’s diverse social demographic, including Dalits (the most oppressed group in the caste hierarchy), Adivasis (indigenous people) and women.
Shalini Singh, 2018 Neiman fellow and also one of the founding trustees of Counter Media Trust that runs PARI mentored Stanzin Saldon, a PARI fellow from Ladakh. She highlights the importance of local reporters, “the advantage [Saldon] had over a city reporter: Speaking to people in their own language and hence being able to more easily establish a rapport.”
The holy grail of funding
Impact media initiatives in India tend to be self funded or depend on a few small supporters, and run on a shoestring budget. India does not have a well-developed media funding ecosystem and government regulations prevent access to funding from foreign sources.
Sainath is clear that the kind of journalism they want to do can’t be sustained by ad or commercial revenues. “The ad revenue model prioritises the advertiser way above the reader, and incredibly way above those PARI write about, covers, tries to highlight.“
PARI operates through reader donations ( about 30 percent of their annual budget), philanthropic foundations and Corporate Social Responsibility funds, augmented with major contributions from the trustees themselves. It relies heavily on voluntary labour including young coders who built its tech platform.
The biggest challenge is that India doesn’t have a well-developed media funding ecosystem while government regulations prevent access to foreign funds. Philanthropic support is generally limited as “donors look for projects that are tangible and easy to measure impact,” according to Ingrid Srinath, Director at the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy, which is part of Ashoka University.
In the end, PARI’s funding constraints determine its ability to grow. “We raise about a quarter to a third of what we’d like to see each year and that curbs us on scale,” said Sainath.
At the heart of it, the organization needs to make others see the value of its journalism. “This is PARI’s main challenge. We cannot say we have built toilets or sent kids to school, [like] service delivery NGOs can,” said Sainath. “We could show you the extraordinary impact PARI is having on the thinking of and interest in rural India among schoolchildren even in urban areas, but that hardly qualifies as tangible.”
Corporate social responsibility funding is difficult too, as many businesses limit themselves to activities like education and health. PARI is also careful about the organizations that it accepts money from, scrutinising where the money comes from — and why. “Forty years of being a reporter have sharpened and tuned my antennae on those fronts,” said Sainath.
Ingrid Srinath also pointed out another reason why many donors are steering clear of this space. “The current political climate has had a strong chilling effect on philanthropists — they are afraid of being associated with the media.”
PARI doesn’t accept direct funding or grants from governments or corporations. It also doesn’t carry ads on the site. Sainath says:
“We guard our independence fiercely at PARI and would not like to ever be told what we could do or not do by governments or corporations. We have an approach to journalism that is neither driven nor determined by market, money power or state power and priorities.”
What’s the way forward then?
In the end, PARI’s funding constraints are limiting its impact. Ingrid Srinath feels, “PARI could be hugely influential in changing attitudes — if it were better known.” She finds funding challenges are making such initiatives suboptimal, “Unless we find the support to amplify this and build scale in a way that is sustainable, they are not going to be able to make a dent.”
Sainath acknowledges that point, “PARI’s work is dependent on our being able to make others see the value of such journalism — not always easy.”
What Sainath plans to do is build a base of small but regular donors, ”(if we have) 3,000 people who give us 10,000 Rupees each year, we’d be able to do all we do and more than we do now.” Sainath understands they are some distance from that number. “But we’ll keep trying. This is what we WANT to do.”
***************************
Shobha S V is an independent writer and researcher based in Bangalore, India.
This story was written for the November 2020 issue of The Story, a fortnightly newsletter on reinventing journalism in the Asia Pacific, published by Jacqui Park. You can sign up for the newsletter here: http://bit.ly/TheStory-AsiaPacific
