On P.Sainath

8/14/2019 On P.Sainath

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P. Sainath

The People who matter mostP. Sainath records the forgotten India

As a freelance journalist,P. Sainath has spent the last 9 years in rural areas, covering

a number of topics related to development - caste, poverty, agriculture, etc. He spends

between 200 and 250 days of each year in the villages he chronicles. Royalties from

the sale of his bookEverybody Loves a Good Drought are used entirely to promote

rural journalism, so that people in the villages can tell their own unfiltered stories.

The following notes are excerpted from his talk at the Association for India's

Development (AID)'s annual meeting in College Park, Maryland in late May 2001.

Excerpts from the Q & A session following the talk are also included.

You would not know that there is an agricultural crisis in India, from looking at theprint media. The growth rate of food production in India is falling, from 3.5% in the1980s to 1.8% in the 1990s. Investment in agriculture has collapsed. NSSOI (TheNational Sample Survey Organization of India) reveals that the 1990s saw the lowestlevel of employment generation since independence (less than 0.7 percent annually inrural India). Non-farm employment doubled during the 1980s, but this too isstagnating now. Rural development outlays are down, and rural credit has collapsed,leading to faster rates of land loss among marginal farmers.

Eenadu, the biggest newspaper in Andhra, has its largest advertisements not fromInformation Technology companies, which despite the hype lag their counterparts in

Karnataka and Tamilnadu considerably. Instead, Eenadu is filled with advertisementsfrom banks announcing the auction of the property of the small and marginal farmerswho can no longer pay their debts. 100,000 crores are owed to the banks in India.62,000 crores of that debt is from 800+ large debtors not one of whom has ever beenfollowed and prosecuted, but the jewelry and household furniture of a small farmer isauctioned for a few thousand rupees. In Rajasthan, the poor have resorted to rotatinghunger, choosing by turn members of the family who must go without food. Where isour sense of outrage?

The crisis states are AP, Rajasthan and Orissa. In the single district of Anantapur, inAndhra Pradesh, between 1997 and 2000, 1800+ people have committed suicides, but

when the state assembly requested these statistics, only 54 were listed. [see April 29and May 6 issues of The Hindu, for more details]. Since suicide is considered a crimein India, the district crime records bureaus list categories for suicide - unrequited love,exams, husbands' and wives' behavior, etc.; in Anantapur, the total from thesecategories was less than 5%. The largest number, 1061 people, were listed as havingcommitted suicide because of "stomach ache". This fatal condition results fromconsuming Ciba-Geigy's pesticide, which the government distributes free, and is


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almost the only thing the rural poor can readily acquire!!

Even the normal sources of migratory work, which typically provide someemployment to persons who are willing to displace themselves each year to taketemporary jobs, are failing. For e.g., people from western Orissa regularly go to West

Bengal, Andhra, and Punjab each year for migrant work, but this year so many peopleleft Orissa looking for jobs that wherever they went the cost of labor collapsed, andmany returned to Orissa, where the administration is unprepared for their unexpectedreturn. [As an aside, holding elections in May is disenfranchising; it denies millionsthe right to vote because they typically migrate from their domiciled areas for labor atthis time, and cannot vote].

Some of these changes are the result of WTO regulations, We removed QuantitativeRestrictions on imports in April 2001 fully two years ahead of the time we are requiredto do so by the WTO! The portrayal of the Indian farmer as non-competitive is alsosleight of hand; sensing the changing environment, the industrialized nations increased

their subsidies 2-6 times in 1980s, and are now reducing them fractionally, portrayingthis as a scale-back of government support! It is a myth that the Indian farmer is notcompetitive. There is no level playing field in India. The free market is a farce. Whoare the people who negotiated on India's behalf at the WTO? What positions do theynow hold? During the earlier round of GATT negotiations, we saw that many whoallegedly represented India instead sold the country down the drain, and took plushobs in the west for their own personal gain.

In India, people have the perception of "subsidies" being given to farmers, and this isone of the reasons why the urban folks think that farmers need to improve their act.But the vast majority of this subsidiy is given not to the farmers themselves but to

fertilizer producers. The "farmers" who get this subsidy are called Birla, Tata andAmbani! Also, this is given in such a way that the more you produce the lower the rateof subsidy, and the smaller amounts you produce, the more higher the rate of subsidy.In theory, this should support the "small farmers", but in fact the large producersoverproduce and understate their output, just so they can avail of the higher rate ofsubsidy.

The poor farmer is sometimes portrayed as uncompetitive, and that he lives offsubsidies; many people take the view that if he cannot compete with global players, heshould try something other than farming. But the reality is that Indian farmers areasked to compete with U.S. farmers who get $35,000 in subsidies per farmer! TheEuropean Union conducts its milk and cheese bonfire each year, destroying surpluswhich might depress prices if released in local markets instead. With markets forcedopen by trade agreements, that produce is dumped in India (and elsewhere), and it killsthe livelihood of the everyday milkman.

Still, the WTO notwithstanding, many failures must be attributed to unilateral policiesfrom the Indian government itself. India has declared a "surplus" of 45 million tonnes,which is really excess unsold stock. Pakistan and Bangladesh together claim a surplus


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of 5 million tonnes. With the largest number of absolute poor in the world now livingin subcontinental Asia, how is this possible? The answer is that the surplus is built onthe declining purchasing power of the poor. If the grain produced in India is dividedby the minimum per capita requirement of food, the surplus vanishes! The claim of"food security" is frivolous, and ignores the fact that some people don't eat! Between

91-94 food prices were increased by 100%. The current govt increased by another100%. What is the expected effect on marginalized farmers? Hunger.

Despite this, the surplus food isn't really available to offset emergencies. For the mostpart, it is improperly stored. Large transport junctions like Jhansi and Itarsi haveenormous heaps of "exposed" food stocks, these are stored at the carrying cost ofRs.1500 a ton. But while we are "looking after" this stuff, it is uncovered, exposed tothe elements, and rotting. As a result, we have declining per-capita availability ingrains, and the healthiest rat population in the world! As each harvest comes along, thegovt buys the grain, does not release into the market, and does not care for it properlyeither. The first consignments of food we sent (with much fanfare) to Iran and Iraq

were returned, because they had gone bad. Whereas the media covered theannouncement of the exports in great detail, their return was barely reported.

With high levels of malnutrition on the one hand, and large food stocks that areinadequately stored on the other hand, any sensible government should have created afood-for-work programme. The Rajasthan government has one, except that in themiddle of a serious shortage of water, the state introduced a food-for-work programmethat includes the construction of a golf course!

The obsession with export markets that drives government policy is extracting a heavytoll in unexpected ways. Fish farming/prawn farming for export has resulted in the

closure of many rice mills. One acre of paddy supports 150 days of labor(man/woman), 40 days of watching over the fields to thwart birds, etc. To tend oneacre of aqua field, on the other hand, takes far less labor. When the government askedoil farmers to increase the yield they responded with great harvests. However, thengovernment then turned around and imported a large amount of palm oil, depressingthe prices that farmers obtained for their bounty.

When the governments made the decision to promote aqua-culture or oilseedcultivation, there was no input sought from the poor themselves, and no assurance ofreward for their embracing these policies. The media has made heroes of both theincompetent and the corrupt. People like Yashwant Sinha or Ahluwalia never askedthe rural poor for permission to make deals on their behalf, and have not cared toexamine the impacts of the deals they have made on the lives of the rural poor. Indeed,the people sitting in decision-making rooms owe more than half of the debt to thetreasury. They are not the poor! Palaniappan Chidambaram is now portrayed as arespectable opinion-maker on the economy, notwithstanding the fact that as Unionminister, he was forced to resign in the Fairgrowth scandal, and even prior to this hehad concealed his conflicting interest in the Enron issue.


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But who are the poor? 40% are landless agricultural laborers. 45% are small andmarginal farmers. They are net purchasers of grain! 7.5% are rural artisans. Everyoneelse is "others". Eighty five percent of the poor have problems directly connected withland, the one issue that has not been on the government's agenda. Even the rural artisanis generally landless. The bulk of Indian poverty is in 7 or 8 states, and in particular

regions within those states. East UP, interior Orissa, Telengana, the Hyderabad-Karnatak region. Within these, the caste face of poverty is apparent. 50-55% of thepopulation in SC/ST communities is poor, whereas 36-39% of the overall population isclassified as poor. The more feudal the region the deeper the poverty. The bulk of thepoor are women and children. The majority of agricultural laborers are women, andoverwhelmingly Dalit women.

Poverty in India is also defined in a strange manner, and conceals even greater depthsof deprivation than is usually reported. The definition is that if per capita incomepermits the purchase 2400 calories of food, then one is not poor. The emphasis is onincome, not actual purchasing power. The reasons date back to the constitution, and to

the original vision of the state as socialist. Unlike the constitutions of mostdemocracies, the Indian constitution includes substantial language on justice, and fromthis view, the state is urged to provide much for the people - housing, health,education, etc. On the assumption that the state meets this obligation, one can treatincome as being available chiefly for food-procurement, and one may be consideredpoor if income is inadequate to purchase food But in reality, much of the income isneeded to obtain the things the state should provide; notwithstanding this, the olddefinition of poverty is nonetheless retained!

Government mechanisms to address poverty are also entirely arbitrary. For instance,the poor are categorized into those below the poverty line (BPL) and those above thepoverty line (APL), but not well off. Quotas are set arbitrary, and even brothers in thesame family might belong to different categories. These categories are also pegged toparticular income levels without any basis. For e.g., people are given certificateslisting their income is Rs.4800, even when they earn far less, because the governmentclaims it has abolished poverty below that level!! Rather than have policies addressreality, the government distorts the truth to create the appearance of meaningfulpolicy! The desperately poor people are now selling their BPL cards!

The government's indifference is most obvious when it needs to make the case that itcares. The most evident example of this is that official estimates of poverty alwaystake a dive before elections - I call this Sainath's Law. Right before the recentlyconcluded elections, for example, it was announced that nationwide poverty is now at26%. The same institutions that put out 9 reports in a row that suggest little change inpoverty suddenly produce a 10th one that celebrates the grand success of povertyreduction! Why, before the 1996 elections, poverty levels were down to 19%, fromtwice that figure only weeks ago! If true, that would constitute the greatestachievement in history, let alone Indian social reform! Expectedly, weeks after theelection, poverty levels were back up in the mid 30% range. The Govt. of India


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Economic surveys freely admit the fallacies of these reports.

Private think tanks are also in the "poverty" business these days. Studies of purchasingpower conducted for transnational groups are turned into "poverty" reports, with littleregard to the fact that they were not designed to study poverty in the first place. Public

policy flows from the acceptance of such nonsense as research. Sometimes, the claimsare less than hazy, they are outright false. One study, for instance, claimed to havecovered 30,000 households and tracked over 300 parameters within each!

More on Sainath

Journalist and author P. Sainath won Amnesty Internationals first-ever GlobalHuman Rights Journalism prize in June 2000. This follows a dozen otherprestigious awards, including the European Commissions Lorenzo NataliJournalism Award in 1994. Sainath received international recognition after hespent two and a half years bicycling through Indias poorest districts, filing reportsabout a class of people the press seldom deigns to write about. That work formedthe basis of his landmark book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin Books,1996), a devastating portrait of how the Indian governments development policieshave gone awry.

The book, which has been translated into three Indian languages as well as Swedish and Finnish, is nowin its eighth printing. It remained the number one non-fiction bestseller by an Indian author for over twoyears. Covering Indias ten poorest districts, Sainath traversed close to a 100,000 kilometresincluding5,000 on footlugging a heavy typewriter (there was never enough electricity around to recharge a laptopbattery). Despite their extremely critical content, several stories from his journey have been used as casestudies for trainees in Indias elite administrative service, the IAS. Other project landmarks include anoral archive of taped interviews with people from the bottom one percent of society talking aboutthemselves and a unique visual archive of thousands of photographs of the Indian poor at work.

Sainath is currently writing a series of reports on the Dalits, formerly calleduntouchables, who remain Indias most marginalized and discriminated-againstpeople. When not on the road, Sainath teaches at Bombays Sophia Polytechnic.He has been a visiting professor at universities in Australia, Canada and the U.S.

P. Sainath answers questions

As the discussion dragged into the third hour and beyond, with Sainath a continuing mine ofinformation to the audience, it was resolved that specific questions would be taken up, in the interest oftime!

Why not give capitalism a chance; after all a lot of other systems have failed. And whyblame the WTO for the failings of the govt?

The WTO and GATT type of agreements are very undemocratic. Corporate leadersmake policy, not the elected representatives. When people in Geneva draw upregulations, some local panchayat leader cannot be asked to address the consequencesof those decisions, when his/her input was not sought in making the decision itself.The idea of different systems is superficial, the most striking aspect of free-market


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capitalism is that it has benefited the exact same people who gained from socialism! Itisn't unexpected, either. After all, the South Commission report was signed byManmohan Singh 90 days before the liberalization process, can he really have changedhis views that much in that time? Political opportunism and media management haveprovided the appearance of different choices and systems, without any meaningful

changes in outcomes.

What sort of medium can reverse the desensitization of the non-poor to the misery ofthose who are suffering?

The Indian intelligentsia have always had an association with the poor. From Gautamato Gandhi. There are major currents in the world and these cannot be escaped. Butsome choices can be made. Those who own the media have a vested interest. Take theRs 1 at which the Times of India is sold, for example. The cost of producing it isRs.7.50, and the distributors pay about 0.57, and only 0.43 is gained from the readerson the basis of content. The rest is obtained from advertisements.

At the same time, we must not abandon mainstream journalism. The Indian press andits freedoms have been won at great cost, and boast an extraordinary tradition. Everyfreedom fighter of repute doubled as a journalist, informing the public. Speaking formyself, I will not cede this high ground; it is extremely important that mainstreamournalism include the true stories of India. Everyone should know what the freedomstruggle was for, who fought, who died, who gained the benefits? In the ToI I did areport called Forgotten Heroes. My next project is about the last remaining FreedomFighters in India. For all its flaws the Constitution of India is a great social contract,that we should reflect on.

Why is the media indifferent?

A: The readers are sensible, and in most publications, the Letters to the Editor columnis the most sensible one. Media is sometimes simply unable to identify indicators ofchange. Weight loss clinics exploded in urban India, the media called it the waragainst obesity. But rural Indians were trying not to lose weight! The automobilerevolution - despite the hype, with 3 television programs a week, there are only 5million autos on the roads. But the rate of growth of sales of bicycles fell dramatically,and no one cared, even though it is a far better indicator of the state of the nation.

What were some positive reactions to the publication of your book?

A: It is not that I write articles and the world changes! But there were a few goodthings that resulted. The Indira Aawaas Yojna program was changed to allow peopleto design the houses built for them in ways relating to their habits and culture, ratherthan force them to live in uniformly designed housing that was often inappropriate totheir needs. The Rajasthan story killed the golf course [see above]. Many of the rulesof Panchayati Raj were changed to stop people from hijacking the Panchayat. On amore personal level, the success of the book has opened doors for me, that I use to


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exhort influential people.

Have droughts, or other natural calamities, been responsible for problems in ruralIndia very much?

A drought makes things worse, but doesn't cause them. The agricultural crisis cannotcause the drought. The rainfall data shows no variation across 100 years in some'drought' areas.

Tell us about things that are working.

1. The Indian Republic today is far more federal than it was in 1947. Dismissinga state government is not as easy. Voices count far more at local and regionallevels.

2. The public is increasingly assertive of its rights. The body language of the

public is changing from servility, to demanding service from publicinstitutions.

3. Political space is having to be held by negotiating. The idea of blind followersto leaders is eroding. The 1996 and 1998 elections were turning points. Muchof the violence we now see is the collapse of servility to traditional overlordsand representatives.

4. The rulers are unable to rule the old way and the ruled are increasinglyunwilling to be ruled the old way.

Microcredit has received a lot of attention, what is your view of this?

Microcredit is a tool. Every ten years the lending institutions get a new fad; the fad ofthe last decade has been microcredit. Is it good? Yes. But credit is not liberating. It isnot transformative. It works when it is local and micro-managed by the participation ofthe lender. Not when it is overarching. Grameen Bank for example, for all its toutedsuccess, worked on a fairly small scale compared to the needs of Bangladesh. TheGrameen Bank and all its lending affiliates accounted for less than 0.6% of the creditin Bangladesh.

How effective has land reform been?

The fastest rate of growth on agriculture in India is currently in West Bengal. So landreforms did help. Land reforms may not be solution but it can give a path to thesolution. Still, across registered surplus land held by the government, less than 2% hasbeen distributed. But what is the surplus land the government has? In every village,there is a patch which the Common Property of the Village, but only in name. The CPResources are denied to laborers at the whim of landowners, as punishment. Landlesspeople need the commons to use as latrines for women, graze their cattle, etc., and


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treating the CPR as the private domain of the powerful has defeated this reserve. AlsoCPR is now being given away. When the tractor took over Haryana the number ofpeople needed to work the land went down, and with harvester combines, the numbersare even less. Common property lands are being privatized. Delhi's farmhouse cultureis entirely built on common property lands. IAS and IFS colonies routinely come up

on such lands.

What does the Indian farmer think of GE crops?

A: It's difficult to give answers about people who span several strata of society.Farmers themselves have historically attempted to grow various kinds of crops. Thedifference is that if a farmer does it he/she lives with it. However, if a MNC does itwill impact half of the population. The scale of things now is different, and we are notalways sure of the health effects of the various things that go into crops. Some farmersare willing to try it, because a lot of 'serious' people are telling them it is a great thing.A lot of farmers are also paying the price for their embrace of the idea, though. There

is some demand now for public accountability and debate now, the technology needsmore public scrutiny.

How are urban poor compared to rural poor?

A: The urban poor are typically the rural poor who have moved. The urban poor endup paying more tax than even middle class. Electricity in many municipalities, forexample, is charged according to the date on which the premises were constructed. So,the middle-classes, who have had their apartments and houses for many decades, paylower rates, where the shanties pay a lot more, even though they don't get the powernearly as often. This is the free market turned on its head, where you supply the lower-

rate payer first! The urban poor may be more visible to us, but their numbers are muchlower than that of the rural poor.

What can we do to alleviate all these problems you have discussed?

I make no great claim to wisdom. Simple solutions for complex problems can notsolve them. Once great starting point that anyone can do is to sensitize himself/herself,and introspect. The fact that we have all gathered here means that we are at leastattempting solutions and sensitizing ourselves, that's a start. There is systematicsuppression, and we must open our eyes to it. There are 70 children in class 1 for every100 who should be. 35 of them have dropped out by class 5, only 10 remain by class 8.Fewer than 5 complete high school. In many schools, children are seated according tocaste at midday meal schemes. This should shame us. What we can do is sensitizeourselves, and be aware of the privilege we have. Dalit bastis are always on thesouthern outskirts because rivers typically flow north-south and the poorer sections aregiven access only to the tail-waters.

Looking inward and being honest with answers is important. The President's speech atRepublic Day in 2000 was a great eye-opener, the first time that any president has


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bothered to honestly examine his role in the constitutional process, and ask meaningfulquestions. Supportive communities here can help in many ways. The most directanswer is to recognize that there are those who are already in the fight to protect thepoor and to bring some measure of opportunity to their lives, and for us to join themand support their needs.

Research and learn a lot more about Patents, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR's), etc.It is very hard, intensive work with a lot to learn and absorb. A proper understandingof these rules will help develop solutions, and to be watchful for their abuse.Developing an Indian version of Lexus-Nexus would be very valuable, too. The needto obtain related information on a number of topics is very high.

How can we contact [email protected]

How do you train and develop journalists in rural areas?

There is enormous energy in rural journalism. These reflect the Dalit and Adivasiupsurge in the last two decades. I learn from them as much as they learn from me. Iteach them techniques. Often, when they write stories these are picked up by thenational press without acknowledgements. Stories are stolen by the big papers. Theseboys are turned into stringers. Acknowledging their effort must be more honest, andmore public. When we give prizes, for example, we give them in the communitywhere the winners are from, and we bring the big editors to give the prize, so the localcommunity recognizes them too.

Srinivas KrovvidyMay-June 2001

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