Everybody Loves a Good Drought by Palagummi Sainath

SAINATH discovered that the acute misery of India's poorest districts was not caused by drought, as the government said. In this India, the harsh life of the rural poor was, in fact, growing harsher. In Everybody Loves a Good Drought, his bestselling book of 1997, and in hundreds of subsequent articles, SAINATH presented his readers with a world that belied the giddy accounts of India's economic miracle.

In 1993, he changed course.įor the next few years, under a fellowship from The Times of India, SAINATH painstakingly investigated life in India's ten poorest districts. At Blitz, a Mumbai tabloid, he rose to be deputy chief editor and became a popular columnist. Believing that ?journalism is for people, not for shareholders,? he has doggedly covered the lives of those who have been left behind.īorn in Chennai in 1957, SAINATH completed a master's degree in history before turning to a life of journalism. As a freelance journalist and rural affairs editor of The Hindu, SAINATH has taken a different path. As the economy surges, matters that call for the urgent attention of the public and government are ignored in favor of film starlets and beauty queens, the stock market, and India's famed IT boom. During those formative years, says Indian reporter PALAGUMMI SAINATH, journalism contributed to 'the liberation of the human being.' In contrast, he says, India's press today merely performs 'stenography' for big business and the governing elite.

In the early twentieth century, the press was at the heart of India's freedom struggle. The RMAF board of trustees recognizes his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's consciousness, moving the nation to action.In such ways, he has touched the conscience of the nation. In 2000, nearly thirty of his articles were submitted as evidence at a national hearing on anti- dalit (untouchable) atrocities. SAINATH's authoritative reporting led Indian authorities to address certain discrete abuses and to enhance relief efforts in states such as Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra.

It was rooted in India's enduring structural inequalities-in poverty, illiteracy, and caste discrimination-and exacerbated by recent economic reforms favoring foreign investment and privatization.

SAINATH discovered that the acute misery of India's poorest districts was not caused by drought, as the government said.

In Everybody Loves a Good Drought, his bestselling book of 1997, and in hundreds of subsequent articles, Sainath presented his readers with a world that belied the giddy accounts of India's economic miracle.

Under a fellowship from The Times of India, SAINATH painstakingly investigated life in India's ten poorest districts.

Everybody Loves a Good Drought by Palagummi Sainath