Palagummi Sainath
The People's Archive of Rural India
P. Sainath, former Rural Affairs Editor of <i>The Hindu</i>, is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts. He was given the award for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness.” He was also the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International’s <i>Global Human Rights Journalism Prize</i> in its inaugural year in 2000. He also won the World Media Summit Global Award for Excellence 2014. He won its Public Welfare award for exemplary news professionals in developing countries, taking the WMS prize in its inaugural year. On June 1, 2015, Sainath became the first ThoughtWorks Chair Professor in Rural India and Digital Knowledge at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He is also the holder of the Coady Chair in Social Justice at the University of St. Francis Xavier, Nova Scotia, Canada. He continues to have his home and base in Mumbai while working most of the year in rural India.
Public lecture
Umesh V Waghmare, JNCASR, Bengaluru
Telling the stories of rural Indians in the digital age
Rural India still accounts for 69 percent of the country’s population, even after a decade of massive migrations, and yet accounts for 0.67 percent of news on the front pages of Indian ‘national’ dailies. The rationale for this in the commercial media is that covering rural India yields them no revenue. However, the future of almost anything we do as a nation hinges on how our policies and activities play out in the lives of the 833 million rural Indians counted in the 2011 Census. The People's Archive of Rural India is a digital multimedia space published in 14 languages from the north, south, east, west, and even northeast. It is a non-profit site that charges no subscription fee and carries no advertising. We try to fill that void in media coverage of rural India. In doing this, we engage and even collaborate with the worlds of science and technology.