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Obituary: P.V. Satheesh, the Communicator and Idealist who Helped Marginalized Communities Find their Voice

P.V. Satheesh, founder and Executive Director of the Deccan Development Society passed away on 19 March, 2023. Periyapatna Venkatasubbaiah Satheesh – P.V. Satheesh to friends – was born in Mysore in 1945. He studied mass communication and television production at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and the Film and Television Institute of India. He joined Doordarshan as a senior producer and worked on programming related to rural development and literacy in Andhra Pradesh. Starting in the early 1980s Satheesh and some friends started an organization called the Deccan Development Society that started working to empower small farmers in a semi-arid region called Pastapur in Telangana.      

Central to Satheesh’s work was the idea of “autonomy”. In a world which was fast globalizing, how could marginalized communities retain agency for themselves and their communities? The answer lay in regaining autonomy over food (production and seeds), natural resources, markets and representation. This was actualized by collectivizing poor Dalit women in the villages around Pastapur into “sanghams”. These sanghams worked towards reviving degraded land, reversing biodiversity loss, alleviating hunger and towards social justice.

Vinod Pavarala got to know PV Satheesh as a student in the mid-1980s, a decade in which many urban professionals left cushy jobs to work in rural areas. When Pavarala joined the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad in the mid-1990s he invited Satheesh to teach television production to his students. “After a while Satheesh got annoyed because the students were joining private television channels rather than working with marginalized communities,” Pavarala recalls. Satheesh instead asked Pavarala to bring his students to Pastapur for fieldwork, where they could experience for themselves the work that DDS was doing.  

Deccan Development Society’s initial foray was reviving degraded lands. The Green Revolution established the hegemony of resource intensive grains like rice and wheat. Traditional dry-land crops like millets and ragi fell by the wayside. The DDS sanghams – encompassing 5,000 women in 75 villages - brought back over ten thousand acres of degraded agricultural lands to active cultivation. They also designed and managed an alternative public distribution system based on the principles of local production, storage and distribution.

Parallel to this was the creation of an autonomy of representation. By the late 1990s DDS was becoming famous and attracting people to Pastapur who wanted to tell its story via video, documentary films and news stories. The DDS women asked a simple question: If they can tell our stories, why can’t we do it ourselves? The women learned to shoot video, edit and tell stories from their own perspective, reversing the traditional “media gaze”. DDS also got involved in a burgeoning movement to free the airwaves to community radio stations.

In 1995 the Supreme Court gave the landmark “airwaves judgement” where a bench ruled that electronic frequencies are public property and directed the government to work towards it. “The government interpreted the judgement narrowly as de-monopolization and auction of airwaves, while we argued that that was an Orwellian interpretation,” Pavarala, who is a board member of DDS, said. “We envisaged community radio as a tool where marginalized sections whose voice wasn’t heard in mainstream media could tell their stories.”

The government didn’t democratize the airwaves immediately, but DDS started “narrow casting” its audio content. The sanghams would record audio about their work and take the tapes to villages where it would be played for a rural audience.

After much policy dithering the Government decided to allow community radio stations and DDS got the first license. In 2008 the sangham community radio station was started by and for the Pastapur women. “Suresh came from a media background and understood how to portray development work as a celebration. Rather than making it into a technology or political issue, or a fight for rights, he converted it into a celebration,” G.V. Ramanjaneyulu, the Executive Director of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, said. “The work of the DDS women showed that it was possible to link the local to the global and the micro to the macro,” Pavarala said.

An obituary in the Frontline by Ashish Kothari states, “the most remarkable transformation achieved by DDS has been that of India’s most oppressed section—Dalit women. The way they have broken through dominant caste and gender stereotypes and hierarchies, and journeyed from being landless labourers to sovereign producers who can hold their head high while facing any audience, is nothing short of revolutionary”.

When Kothari’s organization Kalpavriksh was coordinating India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) Satheesh was invited to join the technical and policy core group. It was decided to facilitate biodiversity action plans at local levels, and Satheesh committed to making one for the area DDS operated in, eventually producing the first of about 100 action plans. Its process involved a mobile biodiversity festival in Pasthapur. Every year in January seeds are collected and taken around the villages in a biodiversity jatra. 

“The government of India is talking about Millets in 2023, but Satheesh has been working on this for over three decades,” Ramanjaneyulu said. According to Kothari, Satheesh called Millets the “crops of truth” and showed how they are the solution to food and livelihood insecurity affecting India’s poorest and most marginalized people. “It is ironical that Satheesh was to leave us in the International Year of Millets. But it is likely that he would also have been unhappy with how the millet agenda is being hijacked by governments and private corporations, and instead of a priority focus on smallholder-based domestic food sovereignty, the government’s millet push is putting exports and elite consumption at centre stage,” Kothari writes.

Ramanjaneyulu said that Satheesh’s work is unparalleled for breaking several myths such as the impossibility of restoring degraded land, the difficulty of empowering marginalized groups and getting them to tell their own stories.