A CLASSIC OF REPORTAGE FROM RURAL INDIA BY AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR, WITH A FOREWORD BY GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI
Acclaimed across the world, prescribed in over 100 universities and colleges, and included in part in The Century's Greatest Reportage (Ordfront, 2000), alongside the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural poverty in India. Twenty years after publication, it remains unsurpassed in the scope and depth of reportage, providing an intimate view of the daily struggles of the poor and the efforts, often ludicrous, made to uplift them.
An illuminating introduction accompanying this twentieth-anniversary edition reveals, alarmingly, how a large section of India continues to suffer in the name of development so that a small percentage may prosper. Besides exposing chronic misgovernance, it is also a devastating comment on the media's failure to speak for the voiceless.
Review
Brilliant . . . It rates comparison with Engels' Condition of the English Working Class . . . but Sainath writes better. - Australian
Exemplary research, a fine sensibility, and much irony . . . an unquestionably fine. - Indian Express
[Sainath] has lifted the poor from the footnote to the page and made them a significant part [of] the very discourse of the Indian republic. - Pioneer
Deserves to be read by every conscientious citizen . . . and yes, by every journalist. - Frontline
About the Author
Palagummi Sainath is founder-editor of the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI). He has been a journalist and reporter for 42 years, covering rural India full time for thirty of those. With an MA in History from JNU, Sainath joined the United News of India in 1980. In 1982, he became foreign editor of The Daily and deputy chief editor of the weekly Blitz in Mumbai. In 1993, he left Blitz to work full-time on reporting rural poverty. He was rural affairs editor of The Hindu from 2004 to 2014.
Sainath has won over 60 national and international reporting awards and fellowships. These include the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, the World Media Summit award 2014, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007, Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Reporting Prize and the Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. He has been teaching journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, for three decades, and also at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, since 2000. He was McGraw Professor of Writing in Princeton in 2012.
In December 2014, Sainath launched PARI. Publishing in 14 languages, PARI is an independent multimedia digital platform, whose reporting mandate is to cover every region and section of rural people. In seven years, PARI has won over 50 journalism awards.
Sainath lives in Mumbai.
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