Mr. Palagummi Sainath is a passionately committed journalist who has continued to report “rural stories” in the face of the rapid changes brought on by India’s globalization. Since establishing the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) platform for digital journalism in 2014, he has been engaged in the ground-breaking project of collecting information about the current situations that rural societies are experiencing, and sharing them in multiple languages.

He gave a lecture on journalism from the perspectives of justice, inequality, and climate change.

Mr. Sainath started his lecture by asking the audience a question: “It is said that the Internet has allowed everyone to voice their views freely. However, what has been really happening?” He answered: “The Internet is dominated and utilized by major companies to earn profits, so it doesn’t help inform others about the hardships that rural people experience. I do not believe that the media functions properly for justice.” For example, India has facing a severe rural crisis since the 1990s where more than 400,000 suicides have occurred in villages. Mr. Sainath has tried to tackle this problem and interviewed over 900 rural families. However, it took seven years for one of India’s major newspapers to cover the suffering of people in rural villages. During that period, Mr. Sainath continued to write articles on this issue.

Looking back on the recent pandemic, he said: “COVID-19 has revealed social inequalities.” He mentioned the following issues that India had experienced during the pandemic:

• -the national government’s attempt to keep urban workers from returning to their rural village homes despite their desire to do so;
• -the vast assets accumulated by medical and pharmaceutical companies that have led to billionaires who, despite representing only 1% of the population of India, account for almost half of its GDP;
• -discontinuing the free distribution from schools of clean sanitary products for female students due to lockdowns; 
• -advancing online education to which some children has no access; and
• -gaps between states or regions in the use of the Internet.

He also mentioned climate change, stating: “We must learn how serious the current situation is. Unless we take any action, the situation is like leaving a leaky tap unfixed.” He supplemented his explanation with photographs he has taken of a village under the sea and a former granary that had turned into a desert. He also referred to the phenomenon of wild animals appearing in human settlements in search of water and food to illustrate the importance of protecting the natural environment from the perspective of preventing new infectious diseases.

“Dialogue with farmers and fishers teaches us what is happening on the earth now. We need people’s media that tells the true stories of ordinary people,” he said, strongly emphasizing “Journalism per se must strive to focus on communities rather than corporations and people rather than profits. We must take action to make changes.