New Delhi, July 17 -- When award-winning photographer M. Palani Kumar speaks about photography, he rarely begins with cameras or composition. Instead, he asks, "Who tells your story?"

The lives of Dalit and marginalised communities have been photographed and documented largely by outsiders for centuries. Their labour has been the subject of exhibitions and coffee-table books, yet they rarely get to write their own stories. Kumar is trying to change that.

Over nearly a decade as a documentary photographer, Kumar has built a model to train young people from these communities to become photographers, journalists and storytellers in their own right. Through the People's Photographers Collective (PPC), which he began informally around five y...