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A beautiful mind
August 1, 2007 | 9 Comments
P. Sainath (short for Palagummi Sainath) is the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu newspaper. He won the journalism, literature and creative communication arts award from the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation for his commitment to “restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness” with his in-depth reporting of India’s social inequalities. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
Sainath has spent the last fifteen years covering a number of topics related to development – caste, poverty, agriculture, etc. He is based in Bombay, India and spends between 200 and 250 days of each year in the villages he chronicles.
A brilliant journalist, a wonderful mentor and friend. A kindred being with an absolutely wicked sense of humour.
Congratulations, dear Sainath and Sonia. She is his pillar, and an achiever in her own right.
According to the citation accompanying the award,
“Sainath discovered that the acute misery of India’s poorest districts was not caused by drought, as the government said. It was rooted in India’s enduring structural inequalities – in poverty, illiteracy, and caste discrimination – and exacerbated by recent economic reforms favouring foreign investment and privatisation.”
Sainath has won several prestigious awards and fellowships, including the B.D. Goenka prize for Excellence in Journalism in 2000, the Prem Bhatia Journalism Prize, the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali prize, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties’ Human Rights Journalism Prize, 1995, the Food and Agriculture Organsiation’s Boerma Award, and the Eisenhower Fellowship.
His reports on some of the poorest districts of the country were published as a book – Everybody loves a Good Drought. The royalties from this book fund the “Countermedia Prize for Excellence in Journalism.” The prize is meant for journalists whose – often outstanding – work gets ignored or even appropriated by the larger press at the State or national level.
In 1993, Sainath received a Times of India fellowship in 1993 to do a series of stories on rural poverty. He spent the next couple of years focusing on a number of particularly backward districts in the poorest regions of the country – two each in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and four in Orissa. The result is some sixty-nine stories, giving us a fascinating set of glimpses of India’s poor scraping by on virtually nothing.
Sainath is also a fantastic photographer. His photo exhibition, Visible Work, Invisible Women, has been exhibited in several cities in India and in the United States, Canada, Japan, South Africa, and Switzerland.
This picture shows migrant labourers at work in a brick kiln in Andhra Pradesh. The outside temperature is a scorching 49 degrees Celsius. The furnace area, where the women mostly work, is even hotter. (Source: Indiatogether.org)
According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation, which conferred upon him the Boerma Award in 2001,
Mr Sainath was the first journalist in India to highlight the impact of misguided policies on food security and poverty, and he has changed the nature of the development debate in the Indian media. Having written several books, numerous articles and built up the largest photo archive on rural livelihoods, Mr Sainath has helped focus public attention on important aspects of the world food problem.
Sainath’s insights about how the media functions in his interview to the FAO HERE.
An excerpt:
I think it was writer Alex Carey who said, There were three great developments in the 20th century: The growth of democracy. The growth of corporate power. And the growth of corporate propaganda to help corporate power halt the growth of democracy. Corporate monopolies are the enemy of democracy, free expression and of human well-being.
The tiny Indian press of the 1890s shook the British raj enough to have the colonial power send down a special correspondent from Reuters to ‘Counter the noisy riff raff of the nationalist press’ during the famines of that period. Imagine, how low literacy rates were in that era, how tiny the press was! Yet a miniscule fragment of a press could serve so wide and great a social function as the freedom of hundreds of millions.
There’s the paradox. Today a gigantic press of far greater reach serves a much smaller and narrower social function. The dominant feature of the media scene is the growing disconnect between mass media and mass reality. The duty of the journalist is to overturn that paradox and help bring about an informed state among people. That happens by showing up the contradictions. By not merely speaking the truth to power, but by speaking the truth about power. And by challenging unjust power itself, if need be.
A sampling of Sainath’s work:
It’s the Policy, stupid, not implementation: Part I and Part II
Why food security is a frivolous claim – Excerpts from Sainath’s talk at the Association for India’s Development (AID)’s annual meeting in College Park, Maryland in May 2001.
Politics of Packages and the Packaging of Politics
An Indian farmer about to commit suicide writes a note of clarification
Sainath has also produced a considerable body of work on caste in India.
The fear of democracy
Caste Off
Caste in India: Two Stories
Invisible India is the elephant in your bedroom (Sainath’s interview on Indiatogether.org)
Some excerpts:
There’s no such thing as a free market, and anyone who thinks we’re going to move agriculture towards a free market should have his brain examined. There’s not a single part of the planet where agriculture is not subsidised. So we should end the hypocrisy about subsidies, and begin to talk about who is receiving them, and who should. If corporations are given money as freebies, it’s called an ‘incentive’, and if farmers are given free power in India, that’s a subsidy! …
Agriculture is one of the largest industries on the planet, and giant corporations control significant chunks of it, leaving farmers completely out of the loop.
Take the case of coffee. It’s almost all produced in the Third World. You can’t grow coffee in Alaska. But growers in the Third World have no control over the actual price of coffee. So, you end up with zooming prices for coffee in London or New York while growers are committing suicide in Wayanad! This is because too much of the marketing and pricing is deciding in back-room lobbying in the developed world, and enforced by global trade agreements like the WTO, or before that, the GATT. All this ‘green room’ stuff is revolting. In nutrition-poor societies in the Third World, we’re being forced to grow cash crops, and remain food dependent on developed countries. …
The fundamental characteristic of our media is the growing disconnect between mass media and mass reality. The other day, there was a lead story, maybe in the ToI, about a guy who paid 15 lakhs to get a private mobile number of his choice, and this was called an ‘awakening of india’s new confidence’. A couple of days later, it turned out that someone else had paid 1.5 crores to ‘collect’ 30 such numbers. There’s simply no way to describe how stuff like this becomes news, and how it stays in the front pages. I keep thinking it can’t get worse but it does. …
In this country, we’ve never looked at the social sector as a potential employment generator. If we embraced that view, instead of romanticising the village, a lot of jobs could be created quickly.
Take the case of education. There is an estimated under-supply of 400,000 schools. Can you imagine the number of jobs we would create if we decided to address this? Simply having one teacher per class, instead of the current one per five classes, would create two million jobs. The construction of the schools, canteen services for them, and all the eco-systems around each school would create millions of more jobs.
(A little factoid that may interest the foodies here: Sainath is a food connoisseur with a decided weakness for fine chocolate. Pedatha of Cooking at Home with Pedatha fame is his maternal aunt.)
Filed Under: food-security, MUSINGS, p.-sainath, Politics, ramon-magsaysay-award, rural-poor, vegetarian recipes
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9 Comments
Thanks for the write up B & J…It’s a good read.
Have to look out for his photo exhibitions, didn’t know that about him!
He is almost the lone voice informing us on the state of the poorest in our country, which most of us are indifferent to from within our urban cocoons. We must figure out what we as individuals must do to better the situation…how I wish there were easy answers.
Your posts are always so informative and thought-provoking… Thanks for a great write-up…
Congratulations to Mr Sainath. Informative and really gets us thinking about our contribution to society.
Congratulations to Mr. Sainath! The world needs more people like him.
When I read and hear about journalists like P. Sainath, my faith and hope in journalism and humanity is renewed. Congratulations.
That was a good read!
“Everybody loves a good drought” is one of my all time favourites. It used to be a Bible of sorts for a while (I remember quoting from here for a few months in almost every assignment during my Masters ). Its splendid to read his writings.
I love the way he puts everything from macro developmental programs to politics and pop culture in perspective – direct, simple and humorous. In my opinion he changed development communication in India(in terms of both style and the development discourse itself) and brought much needed freshness.
In short, P Sainath rocks!!