P. Sainath

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P.SAINATH

Birth Name	Palagummi Sainath
Also known as	Sainath

Palagummi Sainath (1954-) is an award winning Indian development journalist and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of Globalization in India.Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen described him as "one of the world's greatest experts on famine and hunger".

1 Early life
2 As a development journalist
3 Quotes and Opinions
4 Criticisms
5 Honours and Awards
6 US Tour of 2006
7 Books
8 External links

[edit] Early life

Sainath was born into a distinguished family in Andhra Pradesh. He is the grandson of former President of India, V. V. Giri [1] and was educated by the Jesuits in Madras. His preoccupation with social problems and commitment to a political perspective began when he was a student in college. He is a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University,Delhi where he was part of an activist student population. After receiving a Master's degree in history , he launched his career as a journalist at the United News of India in 1980 where he received the news agency's highest individual award. He then worked for the Blitz,then a major South Asian weekly in Mumbai with a circulation of 600,000, first as foreign affairs editor and then as deputy editor,which he continued for ten years.

Sainath then toured nine drought-stricken states in India,about which he ruefully recalled later,

That's when I learned that conventional journalism was above 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. [2]

[edit] As a development journalist

The IMF-led economic reforms launched in 1991 by Manmohan Singh constituted a watershed in India's economic history and in Sainath's journalistic career. He felt that the media's attention was moving from "news" to "entertainment" and consumerism and lifestyles of the urban elite gained prominence in the newspapers which rarely carried news of the reality of poverty in 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.([3])

He quit Blitz and in 1993 applied for a Times of India fellowship. At the interview he spoke of his plans to report from rural India. When an editor asked him, "Suppose I tell you my readers aren't interested in this stuff", Sainath riposted, "When did you last meet your readers to make any such claims on their behalf?"

He got the fellowship and took to the back roads in the ten poorest districts of five states. It meant covering close to 100,000 km across India using 16 forms of transportation, including walking 5,000km on foot([4]). He credits two sympathetic editors at the Times with much of his success in getting the articles published in their present form, since it is one among the very newspapers that has been accused of shifting the onus from page one to page three. The paper ran 84 reports by Sainath across 18 months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought. His writing has provoked responses that include the revamping of the Drought Management Programs in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, development of a policy on indigenous medical systems in Malkangiri in Orissa, and revamping of the Area Development Program for tribal people in Madhya Pradesh state. The Times of India institutionalized his methods of reporting and sixty other leading newspapers initiated columns on poverty and rural development.([5]) They made his journalistic name and earned him numerous prizes, both national and international. The prizes furnished him credibility and also money to go on freelancing.

Through his work on the India's social problems, Sainath changed the nature of the development debate in his own country and across the world. His best selling book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, helped focus public attention on the condition of India's rural poor, increasing public awareness and support. In the last decade, he has spent on average three-fourths of the year with village people,reporting extensively on agrarian crises due to the neo-liberal policies like globalization, privatisation and related government policies and the shift in its priorities, on the lack of sensitivity and efficiency by the government and the bureaucracy and on farmer suicides in Wayanad, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra and on the plight of dalits, writing articles for various newspapers.

The crisis states are AP, Rajasthan and Orissa. In the single district of Anantapur, in Andhra Pradesh, between 1997 and 2000, 1800+ people have committed suicides, but when the state assembly requested these statistics, only 54 were listed. [see April 29 and May 6 issues of The Hindu[6], for more details]. Since suicide is considered a crime in India, the district crime records bureaus list categories for suicide - unrequited love, exams, husbands' and wives' behavior, etc.; in Anantapur, the total from these categories was less than 5%. The largest number, 1061 people, were listed as having committed suicide because of "stomach ache". This fatal condition results from consuming Ciba-Geigy's pesticide, which the government distributes free, and is almost the only thing the rural poor can readily acquire!![7]

At the same time, he writes articles on international economics and politics and critiquing the "corporate-owned" mass media. According to him the shift from hard-hitting, truth-seeking journalism to innocuous, promotional stenography goes hand in hand with the increase of globalization. The photographs he has taken in rural India have resulted in several highly acclaimed photo exhibitions.

He is currently the rural affairs editor of The Hindu.

His current project is on dalits, for the newspaper. This project covers a gigantic area across 15 states in India. He has already covered 150,000 km and has five more states to go. When the newspapers were unwilling to fund beyond a point, Sainath spent from his own resources, his savings, his provident fund, his gratuity - avoiding corporate sponsors.[8]

[edit] Quotes and Opinions

On WTO and Capitalism vs Socialism

The WTO and GATT type of agreements are very undemocratic. Corporate leaders make policy, not the elected representatives. When people in Geneva draw up regulations, some local panchayat leader cannot be asked to address the consequences of those decisions, when his/her input was not sought in making the decision itself. The idea of different systems is superficial, the most striking aspect of free-market capitalism is that it has benefited the exact same people who gained from socialism! It isn't unexpected, either. After all, the South Commission report[9] was signed by Manmohan Singh 90 days before the liberalization process, can he really have changed his views that much in that time? Political opportunism and media management have provided the appearance of different choices and systems, without any meaningful changes in outcomes.[10]

On the condition of law and order maintenance in India

"All the judges of the Supreme Court do not have the power of a single police constable. That constable makes or breaks us. The judges can't re-write the laws and have to listen to learned lawyers of both sides. A constable here simply makes his own laws. He can do almost anything." With state and society winking at him, he pretty much can.[11]

On Market Fundamentalism

Even a call for discussing this amounts to demanding ‘obsolete’ practices of the interventionist state. If we hadn’t mucked around trying to get the state to play God for 50 years, none of this would have happened. If only we had got it right and let the market play God instead.Based on the premise that the market is the solution to all the problems of the human race, it is, too, a very religious fundamentalism. It has its own Gospel: The Gospel of St. Growth, of St. Choice...Welcome to the world of Market Fundamentalism. To the Final Solution.([12])

More of his opinions on various topics can be found here

[edit] Criticisms

Sainath's offensive style of journalism should have normally produced a large number of critics,but for some reason, not many criticisms of his works have appeared.He continues to be a highly respected journalist commanding a moral authority,with his targets choosing to keeping silence than taking up the issues he raises.The nearest piece that has appeared as a criticism of his works is Surjit S. Bhalla's ([13]) critique of a particular point Sainath makes in his article ([14]) on media in Outlook.

[edit] Honours and Awards

Sainath has won numerous awards for his works, including the European Commission's Natali Prize ([15]) in 1994 and the Boerma Journalism Prize from the UN FAO ([16]) in 2001(along with CNN International's Jim Clancy)-- considered as the most important award in development journalism, the Amnesty International global award for human rights journalism in 2000,the PUCL Human Rights Journalism Award, and the B.D. Goenka award for excellence in journalism in 2000. In June 2006 Sainath won the Judges' prize (newspaper category) in the 2005 Harry Chapin Media Awards [17]. This is for his series in The Hindu on the ongoing agrarian crisis in Vidharbha and other areas. The Harry Chapin Media Awards honour print and electronic media for work "that focuses on the causes of hunger and poverty," including "work on economic inequality and insecurity, unemployment, homelessness, domestic and international policies and their reform, community empowerment, sustainable development, food production."

In 1984 he was a Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Western Ontario and in 1988 at Moscow University. He has participated in many international initiatives on communications such as the second and third round table on Global Communications sponsored by the UNESCO (1990 and 1991) and in the UNHCR sponsored World Information Campaign on Human Rights (1991). He was conferred with the prestigious Raja-Lakshmi Award in the year 1993 from Sri Raja-Lakshmi Foundation, Chennai.

[edit] US Tour of 2006

In 2006 Sainath is in the USA for 4 weeks between Sept. 18th and Oct 18th, speaking in multiple cities. Details are as under ...

When	Where	Details
2006/09/19 @ noon	Lucy Ellis Lounge, UIUC, Urbana Champaign, IL	Covering Deprivation — Farm Suicides in India's Brave New World ... http://www.psames.uiuc.edu/events/brownbags-fa06.htm
2006/09/20 @ 4PM	Foellinger Auditorium, UIUC, Urbana Champaign, IL	Globalization, Inequality, and Democracy ... http://www.globalstudies.uiuc.edu/speakers/index.htm
2006/09/21 @ 7PM	Thompson Conference Center auditorium (TCC 1.100), Austin, TX	The Inequality Crisis: Global Gaps that Threaten Democracy ... http://thirdcoastactivist.org/events.html#sep21
2006/09/25 @ 5 PM	University of Denver, Graduate School of International Studies	On globalization and inequality in India
2006/09/26 @ 4 PM	King Center 208, Auraria Campus, University of Colorado, Denver	The Impact of Globalization on India: Poverty and Wealth in the New India
2006/09/28 @ 7:30 PM	Evergreen State College Seminar II Building D, room 1105, Olympia, OR	Neoliberal Destructions, featuring P. Sainath: The Body Count in India, Alexander Cockburn: THe Counter Attack
2006/10/02 @ 6pm	370 Dwinelle Hall, UCB, Berkeley, CA	Neoliberal Destructions, with Alexander Cockburn ; http://ias.berkeley.edu/southasia/events.html
2006/10/04 @ 6:30pm	Room 425, Blegen Hall, Univ. of Minn., Minneapolis, MN	Nero's Guests: Globalization and the age of Inequality ; http://aidmn.org/sainath
2006/10/08 @ 2 PM (?)	College Park, CP	India's Brave New World: The agrarian crisis, farm suicides & the wages of inequality
2006/10/11 @4:30PM	Room 302-304, Gordon Hall (418 North Pleasant Street), Amherst, MA	Farmers' suicides, the agrarian crisis & inequality in India