P. Sainath
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 Sainath |
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Palagummi Sainath (1957-), the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature, and creative communications arts, is an award winning Indian development journalist - a term he himself avoids, instead preferring to call himself a 'rural reporter' or simply 'reporter' - and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of Globalization in India. He spends between 270 and 300 days a year in the rural interior (in 2006, over 300 days) and has done so for the past 14 years. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu, and contributes his columns to India Together, where they are archived. His work has won praise from the likes of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who referred him as "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger".[citation needed]
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[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 at Loyola College. 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. He is now an Executive Council member of the same university. 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. For the last fifteen years he has been visiting faculty at Sophia Polytechnic's Social Communications Media course, inspiring a whole generation of young women journalists.
Sainath then toured ten 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]
He has also said: "There are two kinds of journalists. One kind are journalists, the other are stenographers."
[edit] As a development journalist
There was little doubt from the beginning that he would make a great voice for development. K A Abbas described him thus in 1984, "Sainath is incorrigible, irreverent, indefatigable and, at times, infuriating. To this I shall add one more word: incorruptible. Friends I introduce you to the most irreverent voice in Indian journalism. I bring to you the man who will go through life being the boy who said, 'The Emperor has no clothes'..... I do not know another journalist who cuts to the heart of a matter, past all hypocrisy and camouflage, so clearly and with such humour. I do not know another journalist who can make compassion so compelling."
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.
For more than two years, the book remained No.1 amongst non-fiction bestsellers on diverse lists across the country. Eventually, it entered the ranks of Penguin India’s all-time best sellers. It is considered THE handbook for NGO activists, with its direct reporting style and sharp focus on social and economic cleavages in society. Typically Sainath, he gave all the royalties from this huge best-seller to fund prizes for young rural journalists.
Canadian documentary film maker Joe Moulins made a film about Sainath titled "A tribe of his own", and when the jury at the Edmonton Film Festival picked its winner, it decided to include Sainath in the award along with the maker of the film because this was 'an award about inspiration.'
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.
As a reporter, he proved the power of the Press repeatedly. In one state after another, the bureaucracy and politicians acted upon his stories, preferring this to confrontation or denial. Today, more than any other journalist in India, he has been responsible for the attention brought to the raging farmers' suicides in the country. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Agriculture Commission in Andhra Pradesh to suggest ways for improving agriculture in that state.
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.
One of his more recent projects, on dalits, for The Hindu, is nearly complete, and he is planning a book based on this work. 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]
His current project is on the agrarian crisis nationwide, particularly those regions where its effects are most severe. He has filed over 100 reports on the agrarian crisis in recent years. He has also himself taken all the photographs that go with those reports. And the pictures documenting the families of the suicide victims makes up the only photo record of its kind in existence.
[edit] Quotes and opinions
- over the last several decades, drought in western Orissa, and Kalahandi in particular, has been repeatedly in the news. beyond the sensationalism of news headlines and the reports of distress and starvation, is the tragedy of a population that has been consistently deprived of its rights and entitlements. Be it long term unumployment, drought and crop failure, or displacement and chronic hunger, everything in one of the poorest yet resource rich, districts in india is a struggle.*
- 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
Surjit S. Bhalla's critique of Sainath's article on media in Outlook points out inconsistencies in the statistics used by Sainath, and questions journalist integrity. Salil Tripathi penned another critical view of statistics and inferences by Sainath in the same article.
Aadisht questions the validity of statistics used by Sainath in an article about maternal mortality.
[edit] Honours and awards
One of the few Indians to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, (year:2007, category:Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts [13]), equivalent of the Asian Nobel Prize.
Sainath has won over 30 national and international journalism awards and fellowships in 26 years as a journalist, including the Ramon Magsaysay journalism award in 2007, the European Commission's Natali Prize ([14]) in 1994 and the Boerma Journalism Prize from the UN FAO ([15]) 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 [16]. 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] Books
- Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from Indias Poorest Districts, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-025984-8
[edit] External links
- honouring sainath
- Citation Text from the Ramon Magsaysay foundation
- Collection of Sainath's articles since 2001
- Talking about his work after winning the Boerma Award
- Globalization of Inequality:On Globalization.
- Then there was the market! On Market Fundamentalism.
- Travels with Sainath: by Alexander Cockburn in CounterPunch
- Bio at SAJA
- A TRIBE OF HIS OWN: THE JOURNALISM OF P. SAINATH;Award winning Documentary ISBN 1-56029-952-5
- Video: P. Sainath - Globalizing Inequality (February 25, 2005), talk in Vancouver, Washington, on the Washington State University campus.
- Audio of P.Sainath's talk in Chennai: "India: When rising inequalities threaten Democracy", 19 September 2007
