Palagummi Sainath (byline P. Sainath) is the founder-editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). A journalist for 45 years – and a full-time rural reporter for 33 — Sainath has received over 70 professional awards, including the Magsaysay Prize (2007) and the Fukuoka Grand Prize (2021).
Sainath was the first winner of Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism award (2000) in its inaugural year. He has turned down every state award he’s been offered because Sainath believes “journalists should never accept prizes and rewards from the governments they cover and critique.” Those he has declined include the Padma Bhushan (2009) and the Rs. 1 million YSR award (2021).
Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013. All royalties of this bestseller – now in its 67th print – go each year in prizes to rural reporters writing in Indian languages.
His latest book – The Last Heroes – Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom (6th print) – on India’s anti-colonial freedom struggle, introduces a new innovation: linking books, journalism and the People’s Archive of Rural India.
It recorded the life stories of 16, then still living, ordinary people – farmers, labourers, cooks, couriers, carpenters and more – four of them alive even today.
Each story carries a QR code that, when scanned, takes readers to a ‘Freedom Fighters Gallery’ on PARI where they can see videos and photo albums of each fighter.
Since 1993, Sainath has spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for newspapers like The Times of India and for The Hindu (where he was Rural Editor for a decade).
His path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides –over 400,000 since 1995 – on the national agenda.
In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India, a unique online project on the Indian countryside, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and more. It publishes in 15 languages.
PARI is an independent multimedia digital platform creating a unique database, the only one of its kind that can lay claim to journalism representative of every Indian region.
In 11 years, PARI has won 102 journalism awards, including every single major prize in that field in India. In April 2020, the United States Library of Congress included PARI in their web archives, describing it as “An important part of [their] collection and the historical record.”
Sainath was the only Indian journalist whose work was included in Ordfront’s volume, Best Reporting of the 20th Century. Ordfront chose to feature his work alongside that of giants like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed.
Sainath takes his own photographs for all his reports. His photo exhibition, Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women & Work in Rural India has been viewed by close to a million Indians in different parts of the country since its first edition in 2002.
It mixes text and visuals to document the astonishing yet unacknowledged contribution of poor rural women to the national economy.
Typically, his exhibition was inaugurated by the women who feature in the photos: landless, poor and Dalits, Adivasis or poor OBCs.
Most of the exhibition venues – villages, factory gates, schools and colleges, entrances to mines and quarries, even railway stations at rush hour.
P. Sainath is presently Andrew D. White Professor at Large, Cornell University, and Distinguished Professor NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. Earlier, he was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton (2012).
He has taught journalism for 38 years at different universities and institutions (including UC Berkeley and Princeton). He has taught at the Social Communications Media (SCM) of the Sophia Polytechnic since 1986-87 and at the Asian College Journalism (ACJ), Chennai since 2000.
He has an M.A.in History from JNU. And three conferred doctorates (honoris causa) from the University of Alberta at Edmonton (2011), the University of St. Francis Xavier at Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada (2017) and the Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, A.P., India (2023).