People's Archive of Rural India

PARI is unique in its focus on and extensive documentation of rural Indian lives and livelihoods.[6] Its coverage draws on the extensive work spanning more than three decades of founder-editor P. Sainath on the agrarian economy and current devastating agrarian and water crisis in rural India. PARI reporters include Jaideep Hardikar, Purusottam Thakur, Parth M. N., Aparna Karthikeyan, Arpita Chakrabarty and Anubha Bhonsle.

The content at People's Archive of Rural India is contributed by volunteers, students, journalists and by PARI fellows. PARI contributors have also included award-winning[7][8] journalists like Madhusree Mukerjee, Priyanka Kakodkar, Shalini Singh and Chitrangada Choudhury.

The archive documents rapidly-disappearing languages like the Saimar language which had only 7 speakers left at the time of publication.[9] This part of a larger project of documenting endangered languages. The "Resources" section of PARI contains curated and credible reports on rural India along with a focus and factoids that PARI's team of researchers produce.

Fellowships are awarded for work on specific regions in India. A PARI fellow spends significant time in fieldwork among the region's people and communities and reports on untold stories from the countryside. [10][11]

The story on a post office of a village in [Pithoragarh district]], Uttarakhand [12] went viral on social media immediately on publishing. Within 4 days of the article being published, Pitthorgarh finally had its own post office.[13][14]

Stories reported on PARI have been re-published by Economic & Political Weekly,[15], The Wire[16], Scroll.in,[17] BBC Hindi,[18] Times of India,[19] Youth ki Awaaz, Saddhahaq.com,[20] SunTV, and Mathrubhumi Weekly.

PARI stories have won numerous national and international awards including Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award, The Statesman Award for Rural Reporting and the Lorenzo Natali Media Prize

• On 18 March 2016, PARI Fellow Purusottam Thakur won the Laadli Media and Advertising Award: Best Investigative Story Award for his unique story on a girls' educational institute [21][8]
• The film, "Weaves of Maheshwar” by Nidhi Kamath and Keya Vaswani was awarded the Silver Lotus (Rajat Kamal) for the Best Promotional Film at the 63rd National Film Awards 2016[22]
• On 23 June 2016, PARI received the Praful Bidwai Memorial Award for recording and documenting rural India.[23][24]< The award was presented by noted historian and public intellectual Romila Thapar who cited PARI as “Bold in conceptualisation 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”.[25]