On P. Sainath - Historian of the Everyday!
& A Lovely Note of Appreciation for our Consistent Bloggers
#onhisbirthdaytoday
13th May 2026
We live in an age where media outlets and content creators right from independent YouTubers to major digital news outlets, heavily rely on sensationalism and clickbait tactics to drive views for their pages.
To this end, they make use of sensational titles or dramatic thumbnails that provoke curiosity in the innocent viewer and misguides them to their videos, thus gaining their valuable attention time.
Yes, we live in an attention economy where attention equals revenue for these media outlets. As such, the noble role and responsibility of media houses has been relegated to the back burner especially in this past decade!
And this has fundamentally altered journalistic priorities, often pushing deep, people-oriented issues like poverty and unemployment to the margins in favour of immediate, high-emotion content.
Back in ages past, journalists were held in high esteem, because they acted as public watchdogs, voice of the voiceless, and conscience-keepers of a vibrant democracy. And this they did by investigating governments, corporations, and institutions and holding them accountable for their actions. They exposed corruption, unethical practices, and abuses of power.
Moreover, ethical journalists used to amplify the stories and perspectives of the people living in poverty, deprivation and unemployment, shining a light on social injustice.
P. Sainath is one of those rare journalists who is famous for his consistent dedication to reporting on rural India, poverty, and structural inequality.
At a time when mainstream media depends on sensationalism and increasingly focused on urban consumerism and the lifestyles of the elite, Sainath directed his focus entirely toward the marginalised -
I’m all in awe and admiration for his unrelenting focus on the everyday lives of everyday people, in his writing - on rural India, poverty, and structural inequality.
Instead of covering sensational political corridors or the entertainment quotient of the silver screen, Sainath committed himself to grassroots reporting.
He has spent an average of 270 days a year walking and traveling through India’s poorest, most drought-stricken districts. His philosophy centres on documenting the resilience, labour, and tragedies of ordinary people!
He also deserves credit for being one of those rare-breed of journalists who exposed the profound agrarian crisis in India to mainstream reporting, through his groundbreaking work on the huge scale of farmer suicides in India! He also highlighted the reasons for these mass suicides as a crisis driven by their huge debts, and policy failures on the part of the governments.
It was because of his reporting that, governments across many states were forced to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue and pushed for policies like farm loan waivers and crisis packages for farmers. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had once famously referred to him as “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger.”
In the year 2014, with the noble aim of combating the corporate media’s failure to cover two-thirds of the country’s population, Sainath founded the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI).
PARI is a completely independent, free-access multimedia digital platform dedicated entirely to rural India. It aims to document the 833 million people speaking 780 living languages, archiving their unique occupations, arts, crafts, and cultures before they disappear.
Furthermore, he is a dedicated educator, teaching courses on inequality and rural affairs at institutions globally, including Princeton University, and training young journalists from marginalised communities.
His 1996 book, titled, Everybody Loves a Good Drought - a collection of 84 field reports analysing rural deprivation - remains a seminal text in journalism schools and universities worldwide, encapsulating a career built entirely on giving voice to the voiceless.
I am an avid reader of The Hindu newspaper, every morning, for the past four decades, 😊 and I’ve always admired their consistency in giving wide coverage to rural affairs – which includes poverty, deprivation, hunger, malnutrition and unemployment.
Proud to note that, P. Sainath was the Rural Affairs Editor with The Hindu for a decade, from 2004 until his resignation in 2014. One reason why we have Sainath prescribed in our syllabus HERE.
I still remember the day I listened to a lecture by The Hindu’s Mr. N. Ram, organised by the Asian College of Journalism, on 18th January 2013, where N. Ram said, “You can study anything under the sun, but you can’t be a good journalist unless you cover deprivation!”. You may want to read more on that Lecture on our past blogpost HERE.
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| 18 January 2013 | ACJ |
To conclude this post with a fervent and urgent plea for all of academia -
It’s high time we celebrated the works of Sainath in our classrooms – not only as an academic exercise but also to provide a paradigm shift in the perspective of our students to look beyond the sensational!
In a way, this helps the student to shift their perspectives from a passive study of aesthetics to an active, critical engagement with the lived realities of society!
As Chinua Achebe so famously said,
Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
It is time academia helped our students become these vibrant historians of the everyday.
And in this regard, I am so proud of our consistent bloggers who are doing us proud by being such cute little historians of the everyday, each and every passing day of their holidays!
So proud of you all for celebrating your personal space and making use of your holidays in such noble ways!
Keep it up guys! A huge and memorable special prize awaits you all when College reopens! 😊
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