People’s Archive of Rural India as alternative media

Abstract

The media milieu in India is predominantly commercialized, with increasing concentration of media ownership and institutional political alliances. Nonetheless, there are media in India that operate within a framework distinct from the dominant media system. This paper presents a case study of one these media, the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a multi-media digital platform on rural India founded in 2014 by a veteran Indian journalist, P. Sainath. This paper examines how PARI’s ideological stance, organizational structure, content ownership, production, and distribution practices set it apart from corporate news organizations. In doing so, this study presents PARI as an alternative media that challenges the primarily capitalist values and practices of India’s dominant media. However, PARI also incorporates the institutionalized practices of legacy media, exhibiting hybridity in its organizational form, production, and distribution. The paper also highlights PARI’s limitations and challenges. The author concludes by discussing the need for alternative media to build bridges within and beyond the field of media, to be reflexive and adaptable in navigating its identity, and to respond to the dominant conceptions of journalism.

Keywords:

• People’s Archive of Rural India
• alternative media
• hybridity
• participatory media
• organizational form
• rural journalism

Acknowledgments

This paper is drawn from the larger study of my doctoral dissertation on alternative media in India. I am grateful to my Ph.D. supervisor Dr. Chitralekha for her unwavering support and indispensable contributions which made this paper possible. I am also grateful to PARI founder-editor P. Sainath and the PARI team for contributing their time, insight, and space to make this research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.