P Sainath: The Voice from the Hinterland

Ajith Vijay Kumar

The 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, Palagummi Sainath (born 1957) is one of Asia`s leading developmental studies journalist with numerous writings on issues such as poverty and effects of industrialisation in India. In the words of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen "He is one of the world`s greatest experts on famine and hunger". Through his substantial work on the livelihoods and poverty of India`s rural poor, Sainath has been playing a crucial role in changing the nature of the development debate not just in India but also across the world. He is known to spend as much as 300 days a year in the rural interior and had been doing so for the past 14 years. Currently he is the Rural Affairs Editor and Mumbai Chief of Bureau of The Hindu. Sainath was born into a distinguished family of freedom fighters in Andhra Pradesh in the year 1957 with the illustrious former President of India V V Giri as his grandfather. Education and Career Early education was at the Loyola College in Chennai. His inclination towards social problems and commitment to a political perception on poverty began while he was a student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. After receiving a Master`s degree in history, he began his career as a journalist with the United News of India in 1980. His talent surfaced soon as he received the news agency`s highest individual award within a very short span of time. After a successful stint with UNI, Sainath joined The Blitz, then a prominent tabloid published from Mumbai as foreign affairs editor and then as deputy editor, a position he held for ten years. It was during this period Sainath got the opportunity to tour nine drought-stricken states in India; these travels radically changed his approach towards his work and journalism. “That`s when I learned that conventional journalism was all about the service of power. You always give the last word to authority. I got a couple of prizes, which I didn`t pick up because I was ashamed,” said Sainath. The year 1991 was the turning point in India’s economic fortunes as Dr Manmohan Singh launched economic reforms and that was also the very year Sainath started to emerge as a developmental journalist. Sainath felt that media`s attention was moving from "news" to "entertainment" and that the urban elite was getting prominence in the newspapers at the cost of news on the grim situation in rural India especially poverty. "I felt that if the Indian press was covering the top 5 per cent, I should cover the bottom 5 per cent”, says Sainath. All this internal turmoil made him quit Blitz in 1993 and applied for the Times of India fellowship. After bagging the fellowship, he took to the un-trodden path, the back roads to the ten poorest districts in five states. Covering close to 100,000 km across India, walking 5,000 km on foot, he reached the poorest of poor and reported about their plight. The Times of India published 84 reports by Sainath, many of them subsequently reprinted in his book, “Everybody Loves A Good Drought”. This best selling, widely acclaimed book, published in 1997 helped focus public attention on the condition of India`s rural poor and in turn helped increasing public awareness and support. Sainath discovered that the acute despair prevalent in India`s poorest districts was not due to drought, as the government claimed. He strongly believed that it was rooted in India`s enduring structural inequalities like poverty, illiteracy, and caste discrimination. He focused on the shocking rise in suicides among India`s debt-ridden farmers, revealing that in just six highly effected districts in 2006, the number of suicides had soared to over a thousand, with the government guilty of grossly underestimating the numbers. His relentless pursuit of news from the rural hinterland provoked immense response including the revamping of the Drought Management programmes in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and also on Area Development programme for tribal people in Madhya Pradesh. In the last decade, he has extensively reported on the agrarian crises caused due to the neo-liberal policies like globalization, privatisation and related government policies. He has also shed light on the lack of sensitivity and inefficiency shown by successive governments and the bureaucracy controlled by them. The shocking revelation about India boasting about being a grain surplus country even when 250 million Indians are suffering from endemic hunger is credited to the journalistic pursuits of Sainath. According to his outlook the shift from truth-seeking journalism to bland, promotional content has gone hand in hand with the increase of globalization. Owing to his extensive reporting on poverty and rural developmental issues and its positive effect on the developmental parameters, many other newspapers were forced to initiate columns on poverty and rural development. He is currently working on a project on the impending nationwide agrarian crisis, particularly in regions like Vidarbha, AP and Orissa, where its effects are most severely felt. He has to his credit over 100 reports on the subject. Awards and Recognition Over the years Sainath has won over 30 national and international awards and fellowships as a journalist. The prominent amongst them being:

European Commission`s Natali Prize in 1994.

Amnesty International global award for meritorious human rights journalism in 2000.

The Boerma Journalism Prize from the UN FAO in 2001; the most important award in development journalism. .

The prestigious, B. D. Goenka award for excellence in journalism for the year 2000.

Judges` prize (newspaper category) Harry Chapin Media Awards Apart from these he is also a Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Western Ontario. He has also participated in many international initiatives on communications sponsored by the UNESCO and in the UNHCR sponsored World Information Campaign on Human Rights. And as a tribute to his courageous endeavors in Journalism, immense contribution to literature and creative communication arts, P Sainath has been awarded the Ramon Magsaysay 2007.