Palagummi Sainath

Indian journalist

Palagummi Sainath (born 1957) is an Indian columnist and author of the acclaimed book Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He has extensively written on rural India, his notable interests are poverty, structural inequities, caste discrimination and farmers protests. He founded the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) in 2014, an online platform that focuses on social and economic inequality, rural affairs, poverty, and the aftermath of globalization in India. He was a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and was earlier the Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu until his resignation in 2014. He has received many awards for his journalism. The economist Amartya Sen called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger". His book Everybody Loves a Good Drought is a collection of his field reports as a journalist, and focuses on different aspects of rural deprivation in India.

Sainath was born into a Telugu speaking family in Madras, Madras State (now Chennai, Tamil Nadu). He is the grandson of Indian politician and former President of India, V. V. Giri. Sainath attended Loyola College in Chennai. He has a history degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Sainath started his career at the United News of India in 1980. He then worked for the Blitz, a major Indian weekly tabloid published from Mumbai, first as foreign affairs editor and then as deputy editor, which he continued for ten years. In the fall of 2012, he served as the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University. On 1 June 2015, Sainath became the first ThoughtWorks Chair Professor in Rural India and Digital Knowledge at the Asian College of Journalism. He won the inaugural World Media Summit Global Award for Excellence 2014 in Public Welfare for exemplary news professionals in developing countries. Sainath served as the Coady Chair in Social Justice at St. Francis Xavier University. Sainath is also a photographer. This exhibition Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and work in rural India has been seen by more than 600,000 people in India alone. The exhibit toured internationally and included a showing at the Asia Society.

Writer Manu Joseph caricatures Sainath using a character named "P Sathya" in his 2017 political thriller.

Sainath became the first Indian reporter to win the European Commission's Lorenzo Natali Prize for journalism in 1995. In 2000, he won the inaugural Amnesty International Global Human Rights Journalism Prize. That same year, he was awarded the United Nation's Food & Agriculture Organisation's Boerma Prize. In 2002, he was given the Inspiration Award at the Global Visions Film Festival in Edmonton, Canada. During the decade, Sainath toured ten drought stricken states in India. This tour inspired him to write his book Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He was awarded the Harry Chapin Media Award in New York in 2006. Sainath was awarded the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts. He was given the award for his "passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness". He was the first Indian to win the Magsaysay in that category after R. K. Laxman in 1984. He was the 2007 winner of Ramnath Goenka 'Journalist of the Year' award from The Indian Express. Sainath has not accepted government awards, stating in 2009 that "Journalism should not be judged by government and journalists should not accept awards from governments they are covering or writing about". He therefore turned down the Padma Shri – India’s third highest civilian award – in 2009. On June 28, 2021, Sainath won the Fukuoka Grand Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious international awards that honours "individuals, groups or organisations who create as well as preserve the many distinct and diverse cultures of the Asian Region." In the 31 year history of the award, Sainath is the first Grand Prize Laureate from the field of journalism. Sainath contributed the 5 million yen prize money for two purposes: Rs. 1 million to families of rural journalists who lost their lives to Covid 19, and Rs. 2.3 million to set up People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) fellowships for rural journalists from Dalit and Adivasi communities. On July 7, 2021, the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh announced the winners of its new YSR Lifetime Achievement Awards. Sainath’s was the first name in the journalist category for this prize that gives each winner Rs. 1 million. He, however, turned down the prize as it is his belief that journalists should not accept awards from governments they cover and critique. In his words “the journalist is an external auditor to government". Canadian documentary film maker Joe Moulins made a film about Sainath titled A Tribe of his Own. When the jury at the Edmonton International 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. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters (D. Litt.) degree honoris causa by the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2011 and another D. Litt by the St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, in 2017.