Eminent Indian journalist Dr P Sainath to deliver a keynote lecture in WIDH at IIT Gandhinagar

Gandhinagar: Eminent Indian journalist, former Rural Editor of The Hindu, and Founder of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), Dr P Sainath is going to deliver a keynote lecture at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar on December 17, 2019, as a part of the ongoing ‘Winter Institute in Digital Humanities’ (WIDH) organised in collaboration with the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The title of his talk is – ‘Telling the Stories of 833 Millions: People’s Archive of Rural India’.

Dr P Sainath has won more than 50 national and international awards as a reporter, including the Magsaysay Award. He was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in Fall 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by two other Universities. In India, he has taught journalism for 30 years. His book ‘Everybody Loves A Good Drought’ was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013, and is in its 50th printing. All the royalties of this bestseller go each year in prizes to rural reporters writing in Indian languages. The book is used in teaching, in different disciplines, in more than a hundred colleges and universities in India and overseas.

A journalist since 1980, Dr Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since then spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s leading newspapers. Dr P Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) in 2014, which is a unique independent multimedia digital platform on rural India, to represent every region and section of India’s diverse rural population that encompasses 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and a lot more. PARI, which publishes in 12 Indian languages, is a contemporary journal, a digital textbook for the young.