PALAGUMMI SAINATH

India’s father of rural journalism on “never shutting up“

Words by Sharnya Rajesh

Maharashtra is India’s wealthiest state. It’s bigger than the UK. Its capital, Mumbai, is the nation’s largest city and fnancial centre, and its dusty countryside is a powerhouse of Indian cotton production. But since 1995, due to a combination of drought, crop failure, debt, and corruption, these rural areas have also seen an epidemic of farmer suicides.

In 2006, during the worst week of the crisis, the region of Vidarbha was seeing cotton farmers take their lives at a rate of about one every four hours. Less than an hour’s fight away in Mumbai, the cotton they were growing was on full display as the city hosted Lakmé Fashion Week, one of the biggest fashion events in India. The show was covered by over 500 journalists for a full seven days, and another 100 using day passes.

Meanwhile, just six journalists were in Vidarbha reporting on the suicides. Two stayed longer than planned, but only because they missed their return fights. Only one wrote about it for India’s second-most circulated English language paper, the Hindu. His name was Palagummi Sainath.

Sainath continued to write a news series on India’s agrarian crisis for the Hindu that nudged the world to sit up and take notice. His coverage of the farmers’ suicides in 2006 earned him the Magsaysay Award in 2007 and later the World Media Summit Global Award for Excellence. Over a career spanning four decades, he has tracked other national problems, from migration, India’s ill-equipped healthcare system, dangerous abortions, child marriages, the climate crisis and class issues - to caste wars.

The 65-year-old, who has been nicknamed ‘the father of rural journalism in India’, was the frst Indian reporter to win the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Media Prize in 1995. In 2000, he won the inaugural Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. The same year, he was awarded the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Boerma Prize.

Over the course of his journalistic career, Sainath has collected over 60 global and national awards in total; most recently the Fukuoka Prize in 2021. He has also turned down several, including one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Bhushan, which he declined because in his view, “journalists shouldn’t be receiving awards from governments they cover and critique.” He has taught at various universities, including Iowa, Princeton, Trinity and the University of

California in Berkeley.

Today, seated upright on a wired, iron chair, in a study lit by a white tube light, even when speaking via Zoom, Sainath exudes calmness, and is exceptionally articulate despite covering harrowing subject matter.

He speaks in a British-infected accent; one that marks the Indian elite of his generation. A charismatic, erudite man with a messy mop of silver curls, Sainath is not what you might imagine a rural journalist to be. Based in metropolitan Mumbai, he was born in Chennai (formerly Madras), with generational roots in the Eastern shores of India in Andhra Pradesh, where his grandfather, Varahagiri Venkata Giri, the fourth President of India, hailed from.

His early career path was conventional. In 1983, Sainath dropped his MPhil PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi to work as a journalist with the United News of India agency. But this all changed in 1984, when he moved to a family-owned political paper from Bombay called Blitz, and was sent to collect stories from farmers affected by a major drought. Every story he picked up suggested that the drought was a man-made crisis fueled by inconsiderate government policies. But the stories he fled failed to capture the realities of what was happening on the feld.

“I covered the event in the most typical manner. Very ‘prime minister said-here-today’, kind of journalism. And I won a few prizes for it which I never collected because I was so ashamed about how I’d covered this crisis,” he says.

That was his turning point. “I went back to do it differently. I let the people do the talking this time. I give the problems in their world, their words. My contribution to it is just giving it some context, a link, a connection, a database and pulling it together with some perspective,” he recalls. Sainath applied for a journalism fellowship so that could fund his travel to 10 districts in rural India. He went bankrupt after covering just two and sold his cameras to stay afoat.

“In the end, I’d done 19 districts. Over 100,000 kilometres, mostly on foot,” he says.

His sojourns were documented in a series of newspaper articles written primarily for the Hindu which were later accumulated and compiled to become his frst book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought. The stories intimately captured the complexity of rural India. Not in dry statistics, but through writing, that made the characters of the story recognisable. Each story is detailed. The work, the activity, the culture, the histories, the troubles and the joys are narrated by “the livesof of these people as entry points. Entry points to a much larger issue. Telling it through them means authenticity,” he explains.

While the stories focus on the suicides, they also examine the reasons behind them, like the diffculties associated with acquiring agricultural credit from banks and lack of government support.

Sainath estimates he spends an average of 270 days each year in the villages and rural districts of India. Since the frst drought he covered, he’s been fascinated by the resilience of India’s farmers and forest dwellers.

In India, 65 per cent of the population live in what are called rural areas. The latest Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) revealed 75 per cent of rural households in India have a monthly income of less than £50.65. About half of the households make a living from manual labour, and 28 per cent (over 50 million) of households do not have mobile phones or any form of communication.

There are professions within the industry known only to a fewlike toddy-tappers in the Southern-state of Tamil Nadu, who climb palm trees to make molasses called jaggery, or fermented liquor called toddy. When in season, these farmers climb at least 50 trees per day, each one thrice. They climb close to 1500 metres daily, the equivalent of more than three times the height of the Empire State Building, knowing a single fall could kill or cripple them.

Devoid of any systemic record, unique stories of India’s countryside, like those of toddy-tappers in Tamil Nadu, could be lost.

“There is a growing economic gulf between mass media and mass reality,” Sainath says. The urban world is steadily shedding its links with the voices of rural India. Both provoked by that gap and determined to bridge it, in December of 2014, Sainath founded PARI – the People’s Archive of Rural India.

“PARI, simply put, is the everyday lives of everyday people. It is a contemporary journal and an archive. Above all, it is about telling stories through the lives, lived experiences and voices of the people,” he says.

Today, PARI is an encyclopaedic, volunteer-driven archive of rural India, digitising the faces and cultures of its fast-changing world. The archive is as much a resource as a weapon. It not only documents the great beauty of the countryside being destroyed, but also the rural India that remains obnoxious, inhuman and deserves to be destroyed – like the areas that feature caste-driven untouchability, and atrocities against women.

PARI has covered 25 regions of the country. From fsherwomen on the south-western coast who have been drowning in debt since the 2020 ban on seine fshing (an effcient method that involves low levels of accidental bycatch), signifcantly shrinking their businesses; to the pastoral nomads in the Himalayan passes who rear sheep to make cashmere sweaters, and whose pastures are being fenced by the military and for tourism - threatening their way of life.

Sainath’s storytelling emerges as a byproduct of the way he immerses himself in topics that especially interest him. Topics like the ones above. “The agrarian crisis took me to six states as I attempted to follow the issue. But eventually, it all boiled down to inequality. And inequality manifests in various terms,” he says.

The archive also plays a vital role in giving India’s diverse population access to articles in a variety of languages. About 780 different languages and 86 different scripts are spoken and used in India, with the majority of these used by people in rural areas. However, the Indian constitution lists only 22 languages whose development the government is obliged to promote. There are states whose offcial languages fall outside those 22, like Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya.

PARI works with a volunteer pool of 170 translators and strives to ensure parity among languages. English is their default language, but not the privileged one. Sainath proudly claims that PARI “are the largest single translations journalism website in the world, publishing every single story in 14 languages.”

But languages aren’t the only barriers to fnding stories. The hardest thing is often winning people’s trust.

Journalism by defnition is intrusive. Photography, even more so. “When I enter some poor woman’s home and ask her how much her husband spends on alcohol, why the hell should she tell me?,” he asks. “There must be a good reason for them to trust you, therefore frst networking with someone who has a standing in that community helps. I spend a lot of time staying in the homes of the communities that I’m writing about. It’s also a way of building credibility.”

While writing his book, Sainath spent at least two months in each of the 19 regions he covered. Sometimes he’d keep luggage like his typewriter in little lodges on the outskirts of the towns and villages he was covering, but Sainath himself would often stay in the homes of his subjects.

Miles and miles of India remain untouched. Numerous stories are yet to be told. Aeons of history is waiting to be narrated by the women singing in unison while hand-tilling felds in Maharashtra; generational Khalasi men who launch their heavy ships into the sea without forklifts or cranes; by rural Indians themselves – sharing a world we mostly fail or occasionally refuse to see.

Sainath’s PARI grants primary credit to those who are depicted in the archive, the rural people themselves, rather than the writers or flmmakers who document them.

“Ours is a people’s archive. It can’t lead to dispossession. That’s why we stay clear of any government funding or corporate sponsorship.”

Maintaining independence is a core part of the organisation’s mandate, and associating with corporations will destroy the soul of what PARI stands for, Sainath explains.

“We sell our labour, not our soul,” he says. “The struggle is to keep your soul in a corporate-dominated media. You end up practising what I call ‘guerrilla journalism’ – when they burn one forest, you run to the next.”

But rather than deterring him, it underlies his sense of purpose. “The duty of every citizen in a democracy is to never shut up. That’s a good defnition of the duties of a decent journalist and reporter.”