With no formal training, he began reporting for the Times of India, receiving the news agency’s highest individual award. In 1993 he began writing about India’s poorest districts, describing for the newspaper’s upper-class readers the crushing poverty, lack of basic health care and mass suicides of the region. Public outrage over the series is credited with the Indian government’s creation or reformation of public services in the area, and his articles became a regular feature.
In a typical column, written in July of last year, Sainath described his visit to an area where many villagers were dying and unable to get health care, already in debt to the system’s exorbitant fees. One villager, Gunala Kumar, committed suicide rather than pay his medical debt, as his father had done the year before. One villager, named Janreddy, was dying and unable to get help until his previous health care bills were paid. His daughter was in enforced servitude until the debt of 500,000 rupees —about $11,500—was paid. He died a few hours after being interviewed.
Some of Sainath’s articles were published as a 1996 book, “Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts,” which chronicled Sainath’s journey across 100,000 miles of India, 5,000 of those on foot. The book became the world’s top non-fiction best-seller by an Indian author in 1997-98, according to his press release. It also won 13 awards, including the European Commission’s Journalism Award, and is being used as a teaching aid or textbook at over 100 universities worldwide.
After finding that government data on poverty in the region was sketchy, Sainath began a project in which newspaper journalists gathered and compiled information themselves and assembled the data into a “human poverty database,” according to various articles. The project also measures poverty more comprehensively than the government, according to Sainath’s biography on the Asoka Fellowship website.
http://pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=1653 ---------------------------------------
This article is sad and sobering, and should make anyone think twice about taking articles in The Economist or pronouncements from laissez-faire economists at face value.
It didn't get enough interest in the Editorials section, so I'm hoping that it will receive some attention here. It's a really thought-provoking interview with an Indian journalist.
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