P. Sainath
Encyclopedia
Palagummi Sainath is an India
n journalist. He calls himself a 'rural reporter', or simply a 'reporter' – and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of globalization
in India. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu
, and the website India Together has been archiving some of his work in The Hindu daily for the past six years. Amartya Sen
has called him "one of the world's great experts on famine
and hunger
".
and was educated 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 Indian weekly tabloid published from 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 twenty-five years he has been visiting faculty at Sophia Polytechnic's Social Communications Media course and also at the Asian College of Journalism
in Chennai, inspiring a whole generation of young journalists.
Sainath then toured ten drought-stricken states in India, about which he ruefully recalled later,
He has also said: "There are two kinds of journalists. One kind are journalists, the other are stenographers."
-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.
In 1993 Sainath 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 5,000 km on foot. 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. The book is now in its thirty-first edition and is still in print.
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.' Another documentary film, 'Nero's Guests,' looks at inequality (as manifest in India's agrarian crisis) through Sainath's reporting on the subject. Nero's Guests won the Indian Documentary Producers Association's Gold Medal for best documentary for 2010. It has also won several other awards overseas.
His writing has provoked responses that include the revamping of the Drought Management Programs in the 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. 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.
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.
Sainath also takes all the photographs that have accompanied his reporting for the past 30 years. His exhibition 'Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and work in rural India' has been seen by more than 600,000 people in India alone. A public space exhibition, it has been shown at factory gates, village squares, bus and railway stations, colleges and similar venues in India, but also at galleries overseas, including at the Asia Society in New York and others in Japan, Canada and elsewhere. His photographs constitute the largest body of photographs on labour in rural India.
Sainath's most important work from the past decade focuses on India's agrarian crisis, with roughly 200 exclusive field reports and news analyses and hundreds of photographs. This work established – entirely using official government data – that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995, many of these due to debt-driven distress.
On World Trade Organization
(WTO) and Capitalism vs Socialism,
On the condition of law and order maintenance in India,
On Market Fundamentalism
,
On the absence of reporting on the poor in India,
He is presently covering the problems faced by the rurals in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra.
He is one of few Indians to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award
, which he accepted in 2007 in the category of Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts.
In January 2009 Sainath was reported to have declined a state award. But he has received close to 40 other national and international journalism awards and fellowships in 30 years as a journalist, including the Ramon Magsaysay journalism award in 2007, the European Commission's
Natali Prize in 1994 and the Boerma Journalism Prize from the UN FAO
in 2001 (along with CNN International's
Jim Clancy
), 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. 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 2009 he won the Ramnath Goenka 'Journalist of the Year' award from The Indian Express
.
In 1984 he was a Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Western Ontario
and in 1988 a visiting lecturer at Moscow University. He was also a Distinguished International Professional at Iowa University (Fall 1998), the first McGill Fellow and lecturer at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Spring 2002), and visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley
at the Graduate School of Journalism (Fall 2008). 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.
He is also the only journalist to have won awards from his newspaper's rivals in the north, south, east and west of the country: from the Indian Express in Delhi, the southern edition of the Indian Express now known as the New Indian Express, the Statesman in Kolkata and the fellowship from the Times of India based in Mumbai.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n journalist. He calls himself a 'rural reporter', or simply a 'reporter' – and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
in India. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu
The Hindu
The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
, and the website India Together has been archiving some of his work in The Hindu daily for the past six years. Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...
has called him "one of the world's great experts on famine
Famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has...
and hunger
Hunger
Hunger is the most commonly used term to describe the social condition of people who frequently experience the physical sensation of desiring food.-Malnutrition, famine, starvation:...
".
Early life
Sainath was born into a distinguished family in Madras, now Chennai. He is the grandson of former President of India, V. V. GiriV. V. Giri
Varahagiri Venkata Giri , commonly known as V. V. Giri, was the fourth President of the Republic of India from 24 August 1969 to 23 August 1974.-Early life:...
and was educated at Loyola College
Loyola College, Chennai
Loyola College is a Jesuit institution in Chennai, India. The college admits undergraduates and post-graduates and offers degrees in the liberal arts, sciences and commerce. It is an autonomous institution affiliated with the University of Madras.-History:...
. 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
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Jawaharlal Nehru University, also known as JNU, is located in New Delhi, the capital of India. It is mainly a research oriented postgraduate University with approximately 5,500 students and a faculty strength of around 550.-History:...
, Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...
where he was part of an activist student
Student activism
Student activism is work done by students to effect political, environmental, economic, or social change. It has often focused on making changes in schools, such as increasing student influence over curriculum or improving educational funding...
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
United News of India
United News of India is one of the two primary Indian news agencies. It works in collaboration with several foreign news agencies and partners, including Reuters and DPA....
in 1980 where he received the news agency's highest individual award. He then worked for the Blitz, then a major Indian weekly tabloid published from Mumbai
Mumbai
Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...
with a circulation of 600,000, first as foreign affairs editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
and then as deputy editor, which he continued for ten years. For the last twenty-five years he has been visiting faculty at Sophia Polytechnic's Social Communications Media course and also at the Asian College of Journalism
Asian College of Journalism, Chennai
The Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India is a premier journalism school which offers postgraduate courses in journalism. ACJ offers a one year postgraduate diploma with specialisation in four streams under its 10 month programme – Television, Print, New Media and Radio.In the first...
in Chennai, inspiring a whole generation of young 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.
He has also said: "There are two kinds of journalists. One kind are journalists, the other are stenographers."
As a development journalist
The International Monetary FundInternational Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
-led economic reforms launched in 1991 by Manmohan Singh
Manmohan Singh
Manmohan Singh is the 13th and current Prime Minister of India. He is the only Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to return to power after completing a full five-year term. A Sikh, he is the first non-Hindu to occupy the office. Singh is also the 7th Prime Minister belonging to the Indian...
constituted a watershed in India's economic history
Economic history of India
The known Economic history of India begins with the Indus Valley civilization. The Indus civilization's economy appears to have depended significantly on trade, which was facilitated by advances in transport. Around 600 BC, the Mahajanapadas minted punch-marked silver coins. The period was marked...
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.
In 1993 Sainath 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 5,000 km on foot. 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
Everybody Loves a Good Drought
Everybody Loves a Good Drought is a book written by P. Sainath about his research findings of poverty in the rural districts of India. The book won him the Magsaysay Award.-Sources:****...
.
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. The book is now in its thirty-first edition and is still in print.
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.' Another documentary film, 'Nero's Guests,' looks at inequality (as manifest in India's agrarian crisis) through Sainath's reporting on the subject. Nero's Guests won the Indian Documentary Producers Association's Gold Medal for best documentary for 2010. It has also won several other awards overseas.
His writing has provoked responses that include the revamping of the Drought Management Programs in the state of Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...
, development of a policy on indigenous medical systems in Malkangiri in Orissa
Orissa
Orissa , officially Odisha since Nov 2011, is a state of India, located on the east coast of India, by the Bay of Bengal. It is the modern name of the ancient nation of Kalinga, which was invaded by the Maurya Emperor Ashoka in 261 BC. The modern state of Orissa was established on 1 April...
, and revamping of the Area Development Program for tribal people in Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh , often called the Heart of India, is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and Indore is the largest city....
state. The Times of India institutionalized his methods of reporting and sixty other leading newspapers initiated columns on poverty and rural development. 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
Maharashtra
Maharashtra is a state located in India. It is the second most populous after Uttar Pradesh and third largest state by area in India...
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 29 April and 6 May issues of The HinduThe HinduThe Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
, 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 pesticidePesticidePesticides are substances or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying, repelling or mitigating any pest.A pesticide may be a chemical unicycle, biological agent , antimicrobial, disinfectant or device used against any pest...
, which the government distributes free, and is almost the only thing the rural poor can readily acquire!!
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
The Hindu
The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
.
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.
Sainath also takes all the photographs that have accompanied his reporting for the past 30 years. His exhibition 'Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and work in rural India' has been seen by more than 600,000 people in India alone. A public space exhibition, it has been shown at factory gates, village squares, bus and railway stations, colleges and similar venues in India, but also at galleries overseas, including at the Asia Society in New York and others in Japan, Canada and elsewhere. His photographs constitute the largest body of photographs on labour in rural India.
Sainath's most important work from the past decade focuses on India's agrarian crisis, with roughly 200 exclusive field reports and news analyses and hundreds of photographs. This work established – entirely using official government data – that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995, many of these due to debt-driven distress.
Opinions
On the drought and farmers' suicide in Western Orissa,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 unemployment, 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 World Trade Organization
World Trade Organization
The World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which commenced in 1948...
(WTO) and Capitalism vs Socialism,
The WTO and GATTGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and TradeThe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was negotiated during the UN Conference on Trade and Employment and was the outcome of the failure of negotiating governments to create the International Trade Organization . GATT was signed in 1947 and lasted until 1993, when it was replaced by the World...
type of agreements are very undemocratic. CorporateCorporationA corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...
leaders make policy, not the elected representatives. When people in GenevaGenevaGeneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
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 capitalismFree marketA free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
is that it has benefited the exact same people who gained from socialism! It isn't unexpected, either. After all, the South Commission report 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.
On the condition of law and order maintenance in India,
"All the judges of the Supreme CourtSupreme Court of IndiaThe Supreme Court of India is the highest judicial forum and final court of appeal as established by Part V, Chapter IV of the Constitution of India...
do not have the power of a single police constableConstableA constable is a person holding a particular office, most commonly in law enforcement. The office of constable can vary significantly in different jurisdictions.-Etymology:...
. 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.
On Market Fundamentalism
Market fundamentalism
Market fundamentalism is a pejorative term applied to a strong belief in the ability of laissez-faire or free market economic views or policies to solve economic and social problems....
,
Even a call for discussing this amounts to demanding ‘obsolete’ practices of the interventionist stateEconomic interventionismEconomic interventionism is an action taken by a government in a market economy or market-oriented mixed economy, beyond the basic regulation of fraud and enforcement of contracts, in an effort to affect its own economy...
. 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 GospelGospelA gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...
: The Gospel of St. Growth, of St. Choice...Welcome to the world of Market Fundamentalism. To the Final Solution.
On the absence of reporting on the poor in India,
"You see it in the simplest and most direct way: the organisation of beats. Many beats have become extinct. Take the labour correspondent: when labour issues are covered at all, they come under the header of Industrial Relations, and they’re covered by business correspondents. That means they’re covered by the guy whose job is to walk in the tracks of corporate leaders, and who, when he deigns to look at labour, does it through the eyes of corporate leaders. Now find me the agriculture columnist – in most newspapers, the idea doesn’t exist any more. If you lack correspondents on those two beats, you’re saying 70 per cent of the people in this country don’t matter, I don’t want to talk to them."
He is presently covering the problems faced by the rurals in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra.
Honours and awards
In June 2011, Sainath was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (DLitt) by the University of Alberta, the university's highest honor.He is one of few Indians to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award
Ramon Magsaysay Award
The Ramon Magsaysay Award is an annual award established to perpetuate former Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay's example of integrity in government, courageous service to the people, and pragmatic idealism within a democratic society. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is often considered Asia's Nobel...
, which he accepted in 2007 in the category of Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts.
In January 2009 Sainath was reported to have declined a state award. But he has received close to 40 other national and international journalism awards and fellowships in 30 years as a journalist, including the Ramon Magsaysay journalism award in 2007, the European Commission's
European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
Natali Prize in 1994 and the Boerma Journalism Prize from the UN FAO
Fão
Fão is a town in Esposende Municipality in Portugal....
in 2001 (along with CNN International's
CNN International
CNN International is an international English language television network that carries news, current affairs, politics, opinions, and business programming worldwide. CNN is one of the world's largest news organizations. It is owned by Time Warner, and is affiliated with CNN, which is mainly...
Jim Clancy
Jim Clancy (journalist)
Jim Clancy is an anchor on CNN International, based in Atlanta, Georgia. He most recently anchored The Brief, which aired weekdays at 11 a.m. ET/5 p.m. CET...
), the Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
global award for human rights journalism in 2000,the PUCL Human Rights Journalism Award, and the B.D. Goenka
B.D. Goenka
B.D. Goenka was son of Ramnath Goenka, a newspaper baron of India. He was a manager of the The Indian Express and had been described as the "inveterate foe" of the Nehru family".He died as a result of a cardiac arrest. In his memory the "B.D...
award for excellence in journalism in 2000. In June 2006 Sainath won the Judges' prize (newspaper category) in the 2005 Harry Chapin
Harry Chapin
Harry Forster Chapin was an American singer-songwriter best known in particular for his folk rock songs including "Taxi", "W*O*L*D", and the number-one hit "Cat's in the Cradle". Chapin was also a dedicated humanitarian who fought to end world hunger; he was a key player in the creation of the...
Media Awards. 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 2009 he won the Ramnath Goenka 'Journalist of the Year' award from The Indian Express
The Indian Express
The Indian Express is an Indian English-language daily newspaper. It is published in Mumbai by Indian Express Group. After Ramnath Goenka's death in 1991, the group was split in 1999 among his family members into two with the southern editions taking the name The New Indian Express, while the old...
.
In 1984 he was a Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Western Ontario
University of Western Ontario
The University of Western Ontario is a public research university located in London, Ontario, Canada. The university's main campus covers of land, with the Thames River cutting through the eastern portion of the main campus. Western administers its programs through 12 different faculties and...
and in 1988 a visiting lecturer at Moscow University. He was also a Distinguished International Professional at Iowa University (Fall 1998), the first McGill Fellow and lecturer at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Spring 2002), and visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
at the Graduate School of Journalism (Fall 2008). He has participated in many international initiatives on communications such as the second and third round table on Global Communications sponsored by the UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
(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
Sri Raja-Lakshmi Foundation
Sri Raja-Lakshmi Foundation is a Charitable Trust that promotes Arts, Sciences, Literature, Medicine, Journalism, Humanities and other intellectual pursuits and to honour distinguished persons in these fields. Established in 1979 in Chennai by P.V...
, Chennai.
He is also the only journalist to have won awards from his newspaper's rivals in the north, south, east and west of the country: from the Indian Express in Delhi, the southern edition of the Indian Express now known as the New Indian Express, the Statesman in Kolkata and the fellowship from the Times of India based in Mumbai.
Books
- Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest DistrictsEverybody Loves a Good DroughtEverybody Loves a Good Drought is a book written by P. Sainath about his research findings of poverty in the rural districts of India. The book won him the Magsaysay Award.-Sources:****...
, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-025984-8