Issue 45 Vol II, August 15, 2007

M E D I A

P. Sainath: A  Voice from the Rural India

P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, is among the seven awardees of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2007, it was announced in Manila on Tuesday. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation said that Mr. Sainath won the award in the category ‘Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts.’ The award will be presented in Manila on August 31.

The Board of Trustees of the Foundation recognised Mr. Sainath for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness.”

Mr. Sainath is the sixth Indian print media journalist to win the award. Earlier the prize was given to  famous cartoonist  R.K. Laxman in 1984.  Sainath, on learning of the award, said: “This award is as much The Hindu’s as it is mine… If my work has won the recognition it just has, it is because there was a newspaper backing it unreservedly and giving me total freedom of movement and agenda.” He said he would use the award to push the issue of agrarian crisis much harder.

Mr. 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 Natalie prize, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties’ Human Rights Journalism Prize, 1995, 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. 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.

He is being recognized for "his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's consciousness, moving the nation forward." Sainath, who serves as the rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, was recognized for "his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's consciousness, moving the nation forward." Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen has called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and poverty."

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.

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. Here Sainath got an 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. He strongly 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.

"I felt that if the Indian press was covering the top 5 per cent, I should cover the bottom 5 per cent”, says Sainath. 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 is currently working on a project on the impending nationwide agrarian crisis, particularly in regions like Vidharbha, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, where its effects are most severely felt.

CITATION for Palagummi Sainath

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies

In the early twentieth century, the press was at the heart of India's freedom struggle. 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. 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. Sainath has taken a different path. Believing that "journalism is for people, not for shareholders," he has doggedly covered the lives of those who have been left behind.

Born in Chennai in 1957, Sainath completed a master's degree in history before turning to a life of journalism. At Blitz, a Mumbai tabloid, he rose to be deputy chief editor and became a popular columnist. In 1993, he changed course.

For the next few years, under a fellowship from the Times of India, Sainath painstakingly investigated life in India's ten poorest districts. 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 this India, the harsh life of the rural poor was, in fact, growing harsher.

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 favoring foreign investment and privatization. Indeed, these sweeping changes combined with endemic corruption had led small farmers and landless laborers into evermore crippling debt-with devastating consequences.

Sainath provided the evidence. He reported, for example, that the number of migrant-swollen buses leaving a single poor district for Mumbai each week had increased from one to thirty-four in less than ten years. He exposed the shocking rise in suicides among India's debt-pressed farmers, revealing that in just six hard-hit districts in 2006 alone, the number of suicides had soared to well over a thousand. He revealed that at a time when officials boasted of a national grain surplus, 250 million Indians were suffering from endemic hunger, and that in districts where government storehouses were "stacked to the roof with food grain," tribal children were starving to death.

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. But his deeper message also struck home. In 2000, nearly thirty of his articles were submitted as evidence at a national hearing on anti-Dalit (untouchable) atrocities. In such ways, he has touched the conscience of the nation.

India's press today, Sainath says, is "creating audiences that have no interest in other human beings." He is training a new breed of rural reporters with a different point of view. His journalism workshops occur directly in the villages, where he teaches young the young to identify and write good stories and to be agents of change.

Sainath finds hope in these young reporters and in the resilience and courage of the people he writes about-such as the legions of poor rural women in Tamil Nadu who have overcome taboos and learned to ride a bicycle. To advance freedom, even small freedoms such as this, is the most significant legacy of the early giants of Indian journalism to today's reporters, he says. "I'm not ready to give up on my legacy yet."

In electing Palagummi Sainath to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's consciousness, moving the nation to action.

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