A student in India today is likely to know about the destruction of the Amazon forests, and native American history, but be completely unaware about the state of India’s forests and who are our indigenous people. Our educational systems are grooming a generation of Indians who are far removed from their immediate surroundings, oblivious to social and ethical questions and detached from the growing inequalities around. A ‘PARI Education’ wants to bring these issues into mainstream education, and get young Indians interested in and learning from the diverse communities, lives and livelihoods that make up our country.

We work with schools and colleges to bring stories of rural India into the classroom and curriculum. Our stories cut across subjects and bring alive textbooks concepts. In an Economics’ class, poverty is no longer a number when told through a PARI story – it is the life of a daily wage labourer who lives meal to meal, migrates through the year, and cannot afford school fees for his/her children who have been left at home. We hope to give students the tools and information to question the world around them, and to think critically beyond their textbooks; to be curious and empathetic.

Together with educators, we design sessions, internships and projects that get students out into the field to interact with diverse people and occupations they otherwise don’t see or acknowledge. Further, we work with them, and train them to journalistically report, document and photograph things around them. The best work is featured on PARI.