P. Sainath, one of Asia’s leading development journalists, has established himself as a pre-eminent chronicler of rural life in our times. His writing focuses on the impact of neoliberal globalization on the lives of people, poverty and food security in rural India, and other issues of contemporary concern. He is currently the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu. Through his work on the livelihoods of India’s rural poor, Sainath has changed the nature of the development debate in his own country and across the world.

Believing that responsible journalism can help to change things for the better, Sainath wrote a series of 70 newspaper articles for The Times of India chronicling the living conditions in India’s ten poorest districts. He received international recognition after he spent two years in the poorest districts in India, reporting about the daily struggles of the citizenry. He covered everything from agriculture subsidies to starvation deaths. He traveled across India, often on foot, in hill areas, drought-prone areas, and tribal areas to put the issue of poverty back on the national agenda. His work resulted in an award winning book, “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”, a devastating portrait of Indian government economic policies gone awry.

After nearly a decade of work and dozens of awards, Sainath remains as passionately committed as ever. According to Sainath the shift from hard-hitting, truth-seeking journalism to innocuous, promotional stenography goes hand in hand with the increase of globalization. This, he believes, has also contributed to the 1990s becoming “the time of the most gross social inequality since the Second World War.”

Sainath has won numerous awards for his reportage, including the European Commission’s Natali Prize in 1994 for articles related to development and poverty as well as working and living conditions of vulnerable social groups. In November 2001, he won the Boerma Journalism Prize from the United Nations Food and Agricutural Organization — the most important award in development journalism.