Uncomfortable truth: P. Sainath reminds us that India is still a poor country. (SECOND READ).(Palagummi Sainath)

I first met Sainath in 1992, when he wrote a column called "The Last Page" for Blitz, a left-wing tabloid that was then wavering in its political principles. Each week, his column would tackle a wildly varying subject--the injustice of international patent law, the absurdity of the government's agrarian policies, the hypocrisies of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party--with the delicate wit and insight that would later characterize Drought. I'd already heard about his legendary charisma: Sainath had taught a journalism class at a local women's college for several years, and after they graduated, his awe-struck students would gush about his talent during tea breaks in newsrooms across the country. He won the Times fellowship and went out on the road shortly after I made his acquaintance, but by then he'd already encouraged me to expand the range of my reading (he introduced me to Gunnar Myrdal's Asian Drama and later gifted me a copy of Graham Hancock's Lords of Poverty), and left me with the realization that poverty needed to be reported as a process, not as a series of glaring events, such as starvation deaths, or famine.

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Magnitude is among India's defining characteristics, and Indian journalists are often overwhelmed by--and myopically focused on--the statistics and those glaring events (consider that half of all Indian children under four are malnourished, the number of illiterate Indians today is larger than the country's total population when it won independence, and one of every three people in the world suffering from tuberculosis is Indian). But in Everybody Loves a Good Drought, Sainath brings to life the tragedies that lurk in the gray print of official reports--he shows us the structural reasons for poverty. Few Indian journalists had undertaken the kind of rigorous reporting trips that he had, even in the pre-liberalization period, when journalism that sought out the view from society's margins was a much more valued endeavor. Sainath traveled more than 80,000 bumpy kilometers through the country's ten poorest districts--the basic administrative units that comprise India's states--to learn how the country's poor survive during the 200-240 days after the spring and winter crops have been harvested, when there is no agricultural work to be had.

The coping strategies he found were astonishing. As he writes, "Some of them [are] quite ingenious, all of them backbreaking." In Godda, in the northern state of Bihar, Sainath followed a man named Kishan Yadav on a sixty-kilometer journey as the laborer pushed a reinforced bicycle piled with 250 kilograms of low-grade coal scavenged from the waste dumps of mines all the way to the market. The three-day ordeal, repeated twice a week, was how 3,000 men in the district kept their families alive--a miracle, it would seem, because they earned only about ten rupees (about twenty-five cents at the time) a day. In Ramnad, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Sainath spent time with twenty-seven-year-old Ratnapandi Nadar, who eked out a living tapping palm trees for sap that could be boiled into a sweetener called "jaggery." Nadar worked a sixteen-hour day that began at three in the morning, climbing at least forty trees. "That is roughly equivalent to walking up and down a building of 250 floors daily, using the staircase," notes Sainath.

In a country where poverty is depressingly visible all the time, many middle-class Indians have developed blinders to the distress around them. Sainath's great achievement was to make readers start to pay attention to their poorer countrymen. His lucid writing, so evident in these powerful portraits, had much to do with this. Too often, reportage on poverty is unremittingly grim, weighed down by a severity that deters all but the most determined readers. But Everybody Loves a Good Drought, in addition to being marked by a profound empathy for its subjects, is leavened with black humor. That quality is especially on display when Sainath describes the absurd theater of poverty-alleviation programs and the industry that has sprung up to help "uplift" the less fortunate, to use a verb frequently employed by Indian bureaucrats.

Among the pieces that best illustrate this tragicomedy is a story from Nanpada in Orissa, in which Sainath tells of Mangal Sunani's delight when the government gifted him a cow as part of a poverty-reduction scheme. Officials told Sunani that he and scores of others in the district (who were also given cows) would prosper after their animals were impregnated with the semen of a Jersey bull, thereby producing high-yield cows and other bulls. The officials even gave Sunani an acre of land for free, so that he could grow fodder for the cattle, and offered to pay him the minimum daily wage to work the plot. To ensure that the cows didn't accidentally mate with a local bull, all the male cattle in the region were castrated.

Two years later, the community only had eight crossbred calves; many other calves had died shortly after they were born because the crossbred cows were susceptible to disease. By then, the local, hardier species of cattle had been wiped out because of the castration drive and the cow herders were forced to buy milk from the market. When they attempted to grow vegetables on the patches of land they'd been given, officials were annoyed: they wouldn't be paid their wage if they raised anything but fodder, the villagers were warned. Sainath dryly headlined the piece, VERY FEW SPECIMENS--BUT A LOT OF BULL.

The ludicrousness of the situation even creeps into the names of some of the places from which the dispatches have been filed. One report is from a region of Orissa state that is officially called Cut-Off Area, home to the residents of 152 villages who are stranded on islands in a reservoir created by a dam built in the 1960s to generate hydroelectricity. Though these villagers saw their farms submerged when the power project was constructed, almost none of them actually has electricity at home. Sainath points out that between 1951 and 1990, more than 26 million Indians have been displaced by development projects. But the rewards of these dams, canals, and mines have rarely trickled down to the so-called beneficiaries. It's a section of the book that has special resonance today, given that the Indian government has recently approved the creation of close to four hundred Special Economic Zones, which has resulted in even more farmers being pressured to sell off their land cheaply. The government hopes to attract more investment by giving firms that open offices in the SEZS incentives such as tax holidays and flexible labor regulations. As of early October 2007, just over five-hundred square kilometers had been acquired for these zones. In Drought, Sainath writes, "If the costs [the poor] bear are the price of development, then the rest of the nation is having a free lunch."

Driven by the conviction that, as he suggests, "the press can and does make a difference when it functions" because "governments do react and respond" to reportage, Sainath's commitment to telling the stories of the neglected was obvious from his enormous personal investment in Drought: his fellowship grant was too small to match his ambition, so he kicked in all his retirement savings. Ironically, by the time the pieces were finally collected as a book in 1996, the business managers who had wrested control of newsrooms from the journalists weren't interested in supporting this kind of journalism. Though the book had fired the imaginations of young journalists across India, almost no publications have been willing to invest the resources necessary to allow lengthy investigations into the causes--or processes-of-poverty and deprivation. (Today, only The Hindu, its sister publication, Frontline magazine, and Tehelka, a weekly magazine, seem to regularly find the space for stories about the millions who have been left behind by India's economic surge.) Nonetheless, the book earned Sainath a string of awards both at home and abroad. He has used some of the money he's received from these awards to establish fellowships for rural reporters, giving journalists in small towns who write in regional languages the opportunity and the training to more effectively tell the stories of the countryside. For his part, Sainath, now fifty, continues to write for The Hindu about the economic forces that have pushed thousands of debt-ridden farmers to commit suicide in recent years.

In the last chapter of the book, Sainath considers the role the press could play in promoting genuine development in India. He notes that even when rural stories do find their way into the newspapers, journalists often tend to turn the nongovernmental agencies that have proliferated across the subcontinent into heroes, even though their strategies are often suspect. Covering development "calls for placing people and their needs at the centre of the stories. Not any intermediaries, however saintly," he stresses. He also suggests journalists must begin to pay more attention to rural "political action and class conflict" even at the risk of being labeled leftist. "Evading reality helps no one," he writes. "A society that does not know itself cannot cope."

But that's unlikely to happen as newspapers devote their attention to providing infotainment to consumers, rather than news to citizens. Nonetheless, readers of The Times of India were pleasantly surprised a few months ago to wake up to a new advertising campaign for the newspaper featuring the subcontinent's most famous film star, Amitabh Bachchan, admitting that the burst of economic growth had failed to benefit the country's poorest. "There are two Indias in this country," he declared in a television commercial shot on the contentious Bandra Worli Sea Link.

However, Bachchan's scriptwriter had a novel take on the crisis: he blamed the poor for preventing India from realizing its true potential. As he potters around the 5.6-kilometer bridge, Bachchan says, "One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The other India is the leash."

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