“My generation has lost its connection to rural India,” Sainath, who’s 57, told me. “The generation that’s coming after us doesn’t even know that a connection existed. My grandmother’s generation knew that water came from rains, and they put out vessels to catch the rain. My generation grew up thinking that water came from a tap. Today’s generation thinks that water comes out of plastic bottles.”

So far, Sainath has recruited more than 1,000 volunteers for the archive project, ranging from 30-year veterans of the journalism business to software engineers who’ve nary written a word. They’ve documented some fascinating characters. One of them is a 73-year-old librarian who manages a trove of 170 classics, mostly translations of Russian masters, in a tiny forest village frequented by wild elephants. Another is a young folk dancer who overcame poverty and untouchability—the outlawed but still lingering practice of treating certain castes as “polluted” sub-humans—to win a spot at the country’s top institute for the classical Bharatanatyam form, which, after India’s independence in 1947, has become as much the domain of the elite as ballet is in the United States. Still another is a tribal bard, captured in spontaneous composition-performance of a song protesting the acquisition of his tribe’s ancestral lands by the South Korean steel giant POSCO.

But there are hundreds of thousands of miles yet to travel. Rural India is home to some 800 million people who speak hundreds of languages. Sainath reckons that he’s already spent between $30,000 and $40,000 on the nonprofit project since late 2012, drawing on journalism awards and prizes, along with his own money. But he says he’ll need around $240,000 over the next two years to fund sojourns in rural India by 70-odd “chroniclers.” Though he attracts 150 volunteers a week to do everything from writing articles to helping with back-end work, the quality of some of the content is spotty. And as with many other new-media ventures, it’s unclear whether sufficient thought has gone into the question of what the archive will be—a historical resource or an outlet for subaltern journalism—or how it will survive.

India is currently undergoing what Sainath calls “an extremely painful transformation.” The country’s 2011 census reflected one of the largest mass migrations in history—one that has swelled over the past decade. For the first time, the census recorded more population growth in cities than villages. But despite rapid economic growth in India, the shift bears more resemblance to the Joads leaving the Dust Bowl for California than the Great Migration of southern blacks to Chicago and Detroit. Indians are not so much leaving the countryside to seek better-paying jobs in the city, as they are fleeing increasing poverty resulting from the stagnation of agricultural growth, the rising cost of inputs like water and fertilizer, and a shortage of land. India’s landless agricultural laborers now outnumber landed farmers, and the average plot size of those who do own land is shrinking. Roughly three-quarters of India’s land-owning farmers now till less than two and a half acres of land, according to the latest report by India’s National Sample Survey Organization. They can hope to earn around $84 a month with that sized plot, but it costs them $96 a month to raise their crops, forcing small-scale farmers to take on other jobs to make ends meet. A lack of crop insurance, poor access to low-cost loans, and unpredictable rains—plus cultural pressure to shell out fat dowries and lavish weddings for their daughters—leave many farmers crippled by debt.

A woman picks tendu leaves for use in beedi cigarettes. (P.Sainath/PARI)

Some give up altogether. As many as 300,000 farmers have committed suicide over the past two decades. While statistics such as this, along with the causes behind them, are hotly contested, Sainath argues that the suicide rate among Indian farmers is 47-percent higher than the national average—and believes that the actual number of farmer suicides may be higher than reported. Countless indigenous tribal people, too, have lost their lands and cultures to dams, mines, and tiger reserves.