It's sometimes easy to get stuck in an urban bubble and forget that people who live in cities constitute only a fraction of the Indian population. Around 830 million of our countrymen live in villages. They speak over 700 languages, according to the People's Linguistic Survey of India, and practise a variety of professions that are now in danger of dying out, such as storytelling and the singing of epic poems.

But if there's one journalist who has been a crusader for the country's downtrodden, it is P Sainath. The former rural editor of a national newspaper later started the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), which painstakingly documents the stories that fail to make it to mainstream media.