Everybody loves a good drought

by Palagummi Sainath

The poor in India are, too often, reduced to statistics. In the dry language of development reports and economic projections, the true misery of the 312 million who live below the poverty line, or the 26 million displaced by various projects, or the 13 million who suffer from tuberculosis gets overlooked. In this thoroughly researched study of the poorest of the poor, we get to see how they manage, what sustains them, and the efforts, often ludicrous, to do something for them. The people who figure in this book typify the lives and aspirations of a large section of Indian society, and their stories present us with the true face of development.

Genres: India, Nonfiction, Economics, Politics, History, Journalism, Indian Literature

470 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Palagummi Sainath (born 1957) is an Indian journalist who focuses on social & economic inequality, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermath of globalization in India. He is the founder editor of the People's Archive of Rural India and a senior fellow for Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He was the Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu before resigning in 2014,. The website India Together has been archiving some of his work in The Hindu daily for the past six years. Since late 2011, he has been working on People's Archive of Rural India, PARI, of which he is the Founder Editor.

Amartya Sen has called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger".

In June 2011, Sainath was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (DLitt) by the University of Alberta, the university's highest honor. He is one of few Indians to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, which he accepted in 2007 in the category of Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts.

Reviews

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friends... I am devastated. Shaken to the core by what happens in my beloved country. Ashamed to eat three square meals a day, and call myself Indian, when in parts of India children die like flies due to malnutrition and preventable diseases.

The fact that I am a cog in the machine which contributes to this disaster we call "development" rankles still further.

Review to come... after I recover.

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Well, I think I have recovered sufficiently to do an objective review.

In 1991, a new government came to power in India under P. V. Narasimha Rao. Rao was not really a career politician: he was catapulted into the chair following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the PM-elect of the Congress party during campaigning. It was the first time that a non-member of the Nehru dynasty was heading the Congress and India; and Rao made the even more revolutionary step of appointing the internationally acclaimed economist, Dr. Manmohan Singh, as his finance minister.

Dr. Singh set about dis mantling the economic framework of India in a revolutionary manner. The Nehruvian socialist framework, modelled loosely on Soviet Russia's system (Nehru was a leftist and a fan of Stalin) was demolished and capitalism was ushered in on a red carpet. India's ponderous bureaucracy withered away, the country took to privatisation in a big way, the foreign exchange started pouring in... and India was off, like a rocket. The country has not looked back, since then.

But there was a small minority who bemoaned the destruction of socialism and the rise of corpocracy. They provided dire predictions of economic collapse and subsequent World Bank intervention which would turn India into a vassal state. Manmohan Singh pooh-poohed such fears, saying famously that "there is no way to stop an idea whose time has come". He also said that capitalism would now be different: this would be capitalism with a "human face".

Well, it seemed that Dr. Singh had been proven right, the way India has surged ahead economically and politically. Not a single government since then had gone back on the reforms; the left has slowly eroded in India so that now, we are left with only two alternatives - the centre-right Congress or the far right BJP. It seems that India is indeed shining, and capitalism has finally overcome its traditional enemy socialism.

At least, that is what I thought until I read this book....

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P. Sainath, as a reporter for The Times of India, toured ten of India's poorest districts from May 1993 to June 1995. His aim was to cover poverty in terms of processes, i. e. how it comes into being; as opposed to the coverage of poverty as events, which is the usual style of the press, as disasters make good copy. He makes the point forcefully while covering drought in Nuapada, Orissa:

But at the best of times, the press has viewed drought and scarcity as events. And the belief that only events make news, not processes, distorts understanding. Some of the best reports on poverty suffer from trying to dramatise it as an event. The real drama is in the process. In the causes.

Deforestation has much to do with drought. But being a process, it becomes a ‘feature’. And then disappears into the newspaper ghetto called ‘ecology’—presumed to be of interest only to rabid ‘Greens’.

The reality? The combined investment in all development projects in Orissa since independence is eclipsed by the commercial value of renewable timber and forests lost in making way for them.

Sainath's study of the processes has left me seriously shaken. India's tremendous surge of the recent years has been at the cost of the continued (sometimes increased) misery of the masses at the bottom of the social pyramid - the multitude who have been deprived of even their base humanity since Vedic times.

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...every third human being in the world without safe and adequate water supply is an Indian. Every fourth child on the globe who dies of diarrhoea is an Indian. Every third person in the world with leprosy is an Indian. Every fourth being on the planet dying of water-borne or water-related diseases is an Indian. Of the over sixteen million tuberculosis cases that exist at any time world-wide, 12.7 million are in India. Tens of millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition. It lays their systems open to an array of fatal ailments. Yet, official expenditure on nutrition is less than one per cent of GNP.

Empty public health centres and tribals who still apply to the local witch doctor for curing their ills.

Empty schools and colleges (in one case inhabited by goats!).

People bonded for life to work for free for usurers.

Girls sold off to pay debts.

"Development" which displaces people on massive scales and permanently damages the environment.

I could go on and on. Sainath reports on such instances by the dozen, with passion and sincerity, and also with a certain sarcastic dry wit which would have made reading him a pleasure had not the subject been so disturbing.



Always, the affected people are one at the lowest rung of the social ladder: the Dalits and the Adivasis. These people are officially taken care of by the government: they have reservation quotas in educational institutions and government jobs: a multitude of rural welfare schemes are their for their benefit... but unless old power structures change, these benefits shall stay on paper. The upper classes in India still use the ignorance and lack of education of those at the bottom to hold on to their privileged position in society.

Denying the poor access to knowledge goes back a long way. The ancient Smriti political and legal system drew up vicious punishments for sudras seeking learning. (In those days, that meant learning the Vedas.) If a sudra listens to the Vedas, said one of these laws, ‘his ears are to be filled with molten tin or lac. If he dares to recite the Vedic texts, his body is to be split’. That was the fate of the ‘base-born’. The ancients restricted learning on the basis of birth.

In a modern polity, where the base-born have votes, the elite act differently. Say all the right things. But deny access. Sometimes, mass pressures force concessions. Bend a little. After a while, it’s back to business as usual. As one writer has put it: When the poor get literate and educated, the rich lose their palanquin bearers.

Yes, indeed.

The share of education in our five year plan outlays has been falling. Those who led the country to freedom had a different vision. They wanted that a free India spend no less than 10 per cent of plan outlay on education. Free India honoured that vision only in its breach.
The first five year plan gave education 7.86 per cent of its total outlay. The second plan lowered it to 5.83 per cent. By the fifth plan, education was making do with 3.27 per cent of the outlay. In the seventh plan, the figure was 3.5 per cent. As the problems of her children’s education grew more, India spent less and less on them.

As India pushes more and more towards consumer-oriented development, corporates start to rule the roost. The old feudal system where the landed gentry lorded it over the peasants is replaced by the corporate lackeys exploiting the workers. Only the hats have changed - the people underneath, and their roles, are the same.

Development is the strategy of evasion. When you can’t give people land reform, give them hybrid cows. When you can’t send the children to school, try non-formal education. When you can’t provide basic health to people, talk of health insurance. Can’t give them jobs? Not to worry. Just redefine the words ‘employment opportunities’. Don’t want to do away with using children as a form of slave labour? Never mind. Talk of ‘improving the conditions of child labour’. It sounds good. You can even make money out of it.

This has been true of development, Indian style, for over four decades now.

Central to its philosophy is the idea that we can somehow avoid the big moves, the painful ones, the reforms that Indian society really needs. Is there some way we can improve people’s lives without getting into annoying things like land reform? There isn’t, but there are powerful people who’d like to believe there is.

The same illusion runs through what we call our ‘globalisation’. It has the Indian elite excited. ‘We must globalise. There is no choice. Everybody else is doing it. Look at Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea.’

Of course, ‘everyone’ who is doing it, did a lot of other things. All those countries—if you must take authoritarian states as a model—went through land reform. They gave their people literacy and education, as also some standards of health, shelter, nutrition. Point this out—and the Indian elite discover our ‘cultural uniqueness’. The same is true of child labour. Dozens of other societies got rid of it. But ‘India is different’. So India’s uniqueness does not stand in the way of globalisation. It stands in the way of land reform, education, health. It does not prevent external agencies making policies for India on a wide range of subjects. It does stand in the way of doing away with child labour.

The Indian development experience reeks of this sort of hypocrisy across its four and a half decades. Ignore the big issues long enough, and you can finally dismiss them as ‘outdated’. Nobody will really bother.

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Why does everyone love a good drought?

Well, it brings in money from the government, so the local authorities benefit. The district gets its moment in the limelight; the locals get some goodies, which is like manna from heaven for these piss-poor people. The corrupt officials get money to siphon away, so they are happy. With money in the hands of people, the moneylenders get new victims. And the press positively drools with the possibility of all those photographs of emaciated children which they can splash across their front pages.

In the event, the reasons for the disaster often gets ignored.

I will let Sainath speak.

Drought is, beyond question, among the more serious problems this country faces. Drought relief, almost equally beyond question, is rural India’s biggest growth industry. Often, there is little relation between the two. Relief can go to regions that get lots of rainfall. Even where it goes to scarcity areas, those most in need seldom benefit from it. The poor in such regions understand this. That’s why some of them call drought relief teesra fasl (the third crop). Only, they are not the ones who harvest it...

...Simply put, we have several districts in India that have an abundance of rainfall—but where one section, the poor, can suffer acute drought. That happens when available water resources are colonised by the powerful. Further, the poor are never consulted or asked to participate in designing the ‘programmes’ the anti-drought funds bring...

...Conflicts arising from man-made drought are on the rise. Deforestation does enormous damage. Villagers are increasingly losing control over common water resources. The destruction of traditional irrigation systems is gaining speed. A process of privatisation of water resources is apparent in most of the real drought areas (take the water lords of Ramnad, for instance). There are now two kinds of drought: the real and the rigged. Both can be underway at the same time, in the same place...

...Things haven’t changed too much in some ways. Quite a few journals still freely interchange the words ‘drought’ and ‘famine’. Obviously, these two mean very different things. But the word ‘famine’ is more alarmist and makes better copy. In 1986, one editor argued that the difference between the two was merely ‘semantic’. Present-day efforts at covering poverty still insist on the events approach. Poverty gets covered in breathless tones of horror and shock that suggest something new has happened, even when it hasn’t.

Apparently, crisis merits attention only when it results in catastrophe, not earlier. It takes years for a food surplus district like Kalahandi to arrive at where it has. But that is a process. It does not make news. Maybe it is still worth writing about, though?...

In fact, in many places, drought is called teesra fasl - the "third crop"!

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I could go on and on.

This fantastic piece of journalism gives us a taste of the real India, the India of the villages extolled by the father of our nation, Mahatma Gandhi. This India has been forgotten in the loud celebrations of a capitalist India, an India which is military power and a space research pioneer in South Asia. But it is good for us to remember our brothers out in the wilds, at least once in a while.

Who constitutes the nation? Only the elite? Or do the hundreds of millions of poor in India also make up the nation? Are their interests never identified with national interest?
Or is there more than one nation?

That is a question you often run up against in some of India’s poorest areas. Areas where extremely poor people go into destitution making way for firing ranges, jet fighter plants, coal mines, power projects, dams, sanctuaries, prawn and shrimp farms, even poultry farms. If the costs they bear are the ‘price’ of development, then the rest of the ‘nation’ is having one endless free lunch.

However, the destitute are fighting back. In the last part of the book, Sainath recounts some stories where people have banded together to resist the might of the authorities and the machinations of the moneyed. And they have scored small but significant victories.

Of the battles these stories record, some might end in failure. Mainly because of the lack of sustained and organised democratic politics in those areas. Yet, they also argue hope. People are not quite so passive. They revolt in many ways. And as long as that is the case, there is hope.

Yes, there is always hope in a democracy. Sainath has made a not insignificant contribution to this fight, through this book. And if I can persuade someone to read it through my review, I believe I too would have contributed my mite.

[Sookie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this country:
To read this book is a privilege.
To read this book written in English, is a privilege.
To buy this book is a privilege.
To read this book at night under lights, is a privilege.
To read this book in my home, is a privilege.
To read this book in my own room, is a privilege.
To discuss this book on an online forum, is a privilege.
To express angry opinions regarding some articles in this book, is a privilege.
To drink water after, is a privilege.
To snack while reading, is a privilege.
And it goes on.

The extent to which us urban dwellers are privileged is something those who lack basic resources and infrastructures, cannot fathom.

[Palash Bansal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book encompasses a number of oxymorons. At one moment you feel like laughing at the mindless policies of the government and various commissions, whereas at the very next moment the pain of the helpless catch your imagination making you feel thoroughly depressed and heartbroken.
A very lucid description of the poor of India with a pretty detailed version of the problems faced by them. This book proves that an official can change the lives of a huge number of people and the only factor hindering his/her path is the selfish motives involved at various levels of the machinery. Incidents of heroic acts by some officials, NGOs and the villagers themselves which have changed the lives of many many people who otherwise are faced by a structured system of oppressors, lighten a ray of hope and motivates one to stand up for the cause.
The very fact illustrated beautifully in this book is that even though some policies are meant to do good and are made with a good intention are completely ruined and have proved devastating for the poor, merely because the actual people getting affected do not form a part of the planning stage.
Overall a must read for the urban elites who do not have any incite as to what may be going on about a few minutes drive from their homes.

[Arun Pandiyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

With around 3,000 people rating this book in Goodreads, it had a sensational reach when it was initially published in 1996, further winning him the famous Ramon Magsaysay Award. This book is a compilation of around 80 essays written for the Times of India between 1990 and 1992, touring the poorest districts in India and documenting the lives of people living there, predominantly the tribals. The elites would accuse P Sainath of his dystopian approach in covering India’s abject poverty, but these essays are journalism at its finest and a reflection of the spirit this profession should stand for. Halfway into the book, it reminded me of Shobha De’s commentary in her book Superstar India: “The India we are lauding forms but a microcosm of this vast land. It is the India of the elite, the privileged, and the affluent. The only India we want the rest of the world to see and acknowledge because we are so damned and ashamed of the other. Ashamed and ignorant.”

Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s classic novel Pather Panchali, later made into a movie by Satyajit Ray begins with a very perceptive description of the daily life of an elderly widow named Indir Thakrun. While reading or watching her life, one can affirm the empathy arising from sharing the lives of a fictional character. But, the real-life encounters of the people who live in extreme poverty can be more intense and illuminating. These stories tell us the horrors of caste and its oppressive nature that would be hard to fathom from academic textbooks or survey data. If we are truly concerned about social development, we should take interest in these matters of land reforms, poverty, tribal welfare, and food security.

Jean Dreze introduced himself in his best-seller 'Sense & Solidarity' as a Jholawala Economist, who carries a sling bag, reaching out to the rural population to study their distress. Similarly, P Saintha with his old-fashioned camera had captured the lives of the people in rural India who undergo grave injustices at the hands of their very own State. In specific, the essays on the ‘survival strategies of the poor’ reinforce the harsh realities of rural India where debt, bondage, illiteracy, and malnutrition are rampant. The issue around land acquisition as portrayed in this book raises two questions: “why the poor should sacrifice for growth? Why not we make policies where the rich sacrifice for the benefit of the poor?”

While the market-oriented economists would argue that the best way to help the poor is to increase investment, which can help increase output, employment, and welfare of masses; and increase revenue, which can ultimately be used to finance infrastructure for the development of the economy and if the government has resources, it can be used to subsidize goods and services required by masses, the reality is far from the truth. This book makes the reader revisit Amartya Sen’s ‘development as freedom’ model which emphasizes more on nurturing the human resources through guaranteed education, healthcare, and food security. But, these essays also expose the pervasive corruption, inefficiencies, and leakages in the system which stymies the trickle-down, if at all that theory works in real.

Another chapter on the case of rural debt, narrating the stories of agricultural peasants who sell their produce for dirt cheap prices to the middlemen (tharagar) provides us enough reasons to liberate the agricultural sector from the clutches of these interceders. The rural debt trap has enabled bonded labor in disguised forms and the victims are always from the scheduled castes with their ever-burgeoning debt forcing them to mortgage their only asset ‘ labor’. I was surprised to read that the case of bonded labor narrated in this book was from the Ramnad district of Tamil Nadu. We exult in asserting that we got rid of caste names/surnames in Tamil Nadu, yet a ‘slave with salary’ in Ramnad was originally named ‘Adimai’ (slave). The essays on certain districts from Tamil Nadu will make us introspect our own proclaimed social progress.

In our endeavor to create a good society, social development is vital. Often, social development is reduced to specific quantitative indicators such as child health, elementary education, etc. Undoubtedly, these matters are important, but quantitative indicators which reflect gender inequality, abominations of the caste system, peasant struggle, etc. are scarce. Poverty is a total of a multiplicity of factors and the weightage of these factors varies from region to region, society to society, and culture to culture. The recent multi-dimensional poverty index serves as a good beginning to assess our trajectory. But, as Sainath argues, the Delhi-centric elite media always stay away from the remote areas of rural India. Amartya Sen puts rightly in his ‘An Uncertain Glory’ in a similar tone,

“Wardrobe malfunction and similar celebrity trivia get media attention in many other countries as well. But what is special about India is that an overwhelming majority of the people of the country would have little idea of what a wardrobe is and what a malfunction might mean in this context. If one reads only the newspaper and watches the glitzy channels of broadcasts, one would tend to have a largely misguided notion of how most Indians live and think. There are of course bits and pieces of coverage of the deprivations and struggles of the underprivileged; the coverage of the lives of the deprived is astoundingly limited for the media as a whole. But the problem extends to the lack of interest and engagement from the relatively privileged elite part of society on matters of social inequality and deprivation.”

There are social frailties and inequalities which are brutal realities of India that dance naked in our country even today. Books like these are a must-read for every sane citizen of India to understand what our country really is.

[Rakesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Development is the strategy of evasion. When you can't give people land reform, give them hybrid cows. When you can't send the children to school, try non-formal education. When you can't provide basic health to people, talk of health insurance. Can't give them jobs? Not to worry. Just redefine the words 'employment opportunities'. Don't want to do away with using children as a form of slave labour? Never mind. Talk of 'improving the conditions of child labour'. It sounds good. You can even make money out of it."

[Vik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unspeakably brilliant.

[Karn Satyarthi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing that struck me after finishing the book was that there was a time in India when a newspaper like Times of India could hire someone like Sainath and give him a free hand over his own reportage. Although the book was compiled in the early 1990s and the wide ranging effects of the economic reforms of 1991 had not yet been understood fully Sainath brilliantly indicates the possibilities in case the reform is not handled with utmost care. To a conscientious reader who belongs to the so called middle class of India (a misplaced term in itself since it mostly denotes the top 10 percentile of the income band) all chapters in the book will be hugely embarrassing. In Sainath's writing rhetoric is conspicuous by its absence it is almost like he is covering an India where people have skeletons and no fat.
Sainath not only raises pertinent questions but also shows how most times 'bureaucratic procedure' is the poor man's greatest enemy. In my view this book is a must read for all aspiring journalists and public servants.

[Vaishakh Ravi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book provides an account of the life of the other India, one that's rarely portrayed in media, an India which many of us grow up unaware of, being raised in cities. The narrative is chilling, affects one at a deep level and is quite perspective altering.

It's a story about the sheer apathy India shows to these less fortunate citizens. It questions the very concepts we use when we think of progress - GDP? What does that even mean for the millions of Indian citizens who're cut-off from the larger economy? Then there's an account of the extent of corruption. Stories of corruption aren't new to us. But corruption of the kind that's shown here, devoid of the slightest of humanity brings out a deep sense of disgust from within, and is profoundly illuminating.

Although these stories are ~20 years old, I'm willing to bet that they occur even in the present day (to a lesser extent hopefully?). And especially as corporate influences on govt. only seems to increase with the present political regime, in a sense, the book is more relevant than ever. Perhaps the only silver lining is that better accounting of the population and digitization via schemes such as Aadhar should help weed out some of the corruption.

[S.Ach · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you read these short accounts (mostly newspaper reports) of some of the poorest people of India, about their lives and livelihood, about their gullibility and superstitions, about their victimization by the corrupt and mindless policy-makers, about their misery and public apathy towards their sufferings, you will go through a series of emotions - starting from a mix of anger, amusement and pity , slowly moving to frustration and sympathy and finally succumbing to hopeless depression.

Good Luck.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be mandatory reading for every Indian, particularly those working in fields even remotely related to Economics, development, journalism and of course, politics. This is the kind of book that doesn't simply urge you to take off your rose tinted glasses, it enables you to understand the layers of privilege that allowed you to own those glasses in the first place, and forces you to adjust your eyes to the depressing, grey world around your white picket fence. Again, every single Indian should read this book. In school.

[Raman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for the privileged, elite class.We do know that poverty exist but we turn a blind eye towards it.
We pay our taxes and think our deed is done.
While reading it, you will visit lives of people living in remote and poor villages of india in 80s and 90s and how the government policies have effected them, their struggles, their fight for the survival.
Just hoping that things might have changed now but I know its a high hope.
Book teaches us to be humble and thankful for what we have and also protect and stand up for the weak and fight for their rights. No effort is small if the intention is good.

[Prashant Mujagond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books age, but they do not grow old. They reappear in edition after edition, language after language. They become part of humanity’s evolving consciousness. This book is the result of work carried between 1993 to 1995 by Palagummi Sainath, who is one of the most renowned Journalists from India. It covers stories from Eight districts, sorry to say Poorest Districts from seven states of the country. These stories show how a large section of the country continues to suffer in the name of development.

Books like these live, breathe and have their being in human hands.

Deserves to be read by every conscientious citizen, and every journalist.

[Vaidya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given the nature of the topic, it would have been tempting for the author to wallow in the poverty of the people he writes about. It could have sold a lot more copies for sure. Remember Lapierre's La ciudad de la alegría? At the end of it, you just wanted the characters to die and be rid of their suffering.

It's a huge credit to Sainath for side-stepping that and going straight to the matter. Straight to numbers. Number of PHCs, number of schools, number of teachers, percentage attendance, number of students, number of dropouts, number of literates. Amount of rainfall, total productivity, percentage people with access to water, percentage of land irrigated. Number of acres owned, amount borrowed from bank, amount borrowed from others, amount owed at 120% percent interest. Number of harvests, number of days of agriculture, number of days migrating to other towns. Amount earned per day there, amount that is the minimum wage in that state. Amount spent to get back to home for weekends, amount left. Amount spent on liquor, amount that goes to the guy you owe. Kgs you cultivate, Kgs that go to the lender, Kgs that he pays for, the Min support price of the Govt and how much he pays.

This is what you get. This is how you make sense of the processes that run the gigantic machinery called poverty in rural India. You understand that getting more rainfall than the rest of the country does not mean all farmers are rich. On the other hand, getting less also does not mean you are entirely destitute. Drought is not just about rainfall, but access to water and denial can happen in multiple ways.

And on the other side, you are presented the laws. Laws that say that adivasi land cannot be auctioned, sold or taken over by anyone, laws against usury, laws against bonded labour, laws against arrack distillation, laws against cutting down forests, laws against everything that happens.
And you still see how an adivasi woman is robbed off 10 acres of land, by a bank because she hasn't paid back a loan she never took. Where a land of value Rs. 2 Lakhs is 'auctioned' to the lone buyer at 9 in the night for Rs. 17000, to repay an amount of Rs. 13000 she 'owes', where the bank takes the remaining Rs. 4000, leaving her with nothing.

Processes. Not events. Processes are what lead to a state. Processes are what need to be fixed. Not events. Like giving 2 cows (substandard as some money was eaten) to tribals who aren't pastoral and are beef-eaters. What you get is cows that are dying, first, because they are substandard, second, because the place where they've been given is not conducive for livestock,and third, the tribals are so poor they can't afford to feed even themselves. What they do is eat the dying cows and go back to poverty.

The book was written in 1995. Many points still hold true. We haven't made too much progress in the UN Human Dev Index and the reasons show (Yes, with increasing GDP, the HDI also was expected to go up from the 80s and 90s). The value of MNREGA cannot be overstated, especially in holding off on mass migrations during the non-agricultural seasons. We still talk of poverty in terms of reforms that generate jobs, while totally forgetting basic indicators like education, health, proper law enforcement and good environment. These are the people who are most affected when forests are cut down, and they don't even benefit from them.

The last few chapters show hope. Of people fighting their systems, willing to take on the backlash from contractors, liquor lobbies, the police and even the politicos. It also asserts that minor pushes in the right direction can go a long way. Most of the work done by Nitish Kumar in Bihar stand out as an example for that.

A must read!

[Bharathwaj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Half way through, ‘Everybody loves a good drought’, I almost made up my mind to not finish the book. All the anecdotes capturing the miserable lives of rural India cut too close. These were not stories that I could brush aside as having taken place 25 years before. The major causes of these wretched people’s predicament exist even today. The long line of displaced workers who walked out of Delhi when the Corona lockdown began comes to mind. Be it well intentioned government policies gone awry or the callousness and apathy of the government machinery or individual maliciousness towards people who do not have a voice, all these persist. The monstrous government machinery slowly grinds these people to dust. This is not to blame an abstract body and absolve ourselves of this brutality. The fact that I could sit on a comfortable bed and dispassionately look at these lives from afar made me realize the enormous privilege I have. Every one of these stories made me uneasy. From uneasiness grows empathy, I guess. The anecdotes cover tribal and oppressed people across the poorest districts in India 25 years back. It came as a surprise to me that Tamil Nadu was one of the top 5 states with the most people living below the poverty line around the time this book was written. Although it brings hope that a lot has changed since then in my state, I wonder how the other people fared. Did the people displaced for ‘development’ projects finally get their due? Do the Bondas of Odisha have a school their children can go to? Or what about the Koyas? Can they freely harvest bamboos for their trade or have they all been driven out, consumed by the paper companies’ greed? I wish I knew the answers. And if my cynical mind is right, these questions will have answers that do not taste sweet. I am glad that the book left me with so many questions though.

[Shrinidhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this insightful and exceptional work of journalism, Mr Sainath attempts to deconstruct poverty in India by covering the stories from some of the poorest of the poor districts.
Why are these people so poor even after all these years of poverty alleviation programmes, relief work and financial aid?

The author covers two districts each from Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. The stories cover the inefficiency of relief programmes, the prevention of funds trickling down to alleviate the most impoverished, displacement of locals due to 'development' projects, destruction of forest and agricultural land, the vicious cycle of debt due to unethical moneylending, arrack, and lastly, famine and drought. It takes the reader through the stories of the tribals and locals (mostly lower caste - 50% of the people affected by displacement are SC/ST) and shows the effect that the above issues have not just on their families but also on their following generations.

David Foster Wallace, while talking about watching video of the 9/11 attack, says 'It seems grotesque to talk about being traumatized by a video when the people in the video were dying'. Similarly, I feel grotesque about talking or writing about being affected by reading an account of the suffering of the millions while they continue to suffer. This is indeed a tragedy, and one of epic proportions. Also, as one from an elite and privileged populace, it's easy to be oblivious to the havoc that we wreak on the poor ('the elite act differently. Say all the right things. But deny access to the underprivileged')

Poverty is not an event but a process. And it requires an empathy and understanding beyond what the statistics (which are ghastly enough) can evoke. This is the essence of the book and it does this with its stories. An eye-opener.

[Harikrishna Raghuraman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of some gut-wrenching reports centered in the early 90s in a few of the poorest districts in India. Be it well-intentioned but ill-formed projects set up by the welfare departments who are not aware of what the people need, or the projects put above people driving them out of their lands, tradition and simply existence, or the pure apathy, if not the deliberate greed and maliciousness, of the authorities, the politicians, the corporates and the bigwigs, most relief and development never trickle down to the needy.

The coal mining, hydro projects sprung across the country benefit the contractors rather than the people. Roads are laid, infrastructures are drawn up for the ministers visit than the people’s livelihood. Give cattle to people who don’t consume milk products and who can’t afford fodder. Extort the incredible talent of Pema Fatiah (Bhil artist) to decorate and enrich your own place. Penalize the poor who take bamboo to support the paper industry. Force people out of their home to train army and compensate them one rupee per night. And build schools and PHCs and never make sure to have teachers and nurses available. Well, blame that managing a country of such population and cultural differences is not easy. But expect the NGOs to handle the burden that an elected government with the power of state machinery apparently can’t do.

I started writing notes to return to do some research on what happened to these people and projects now, thirty years later. I would not be surprised to see the status quo maintained if not gone for the worse. Most of the absolute rupee value makes you realize how privileged you are, even if you regularly can afford one meal a day, everyday.

Yes, there are some schemes, a few officials, and organizations which have been helping them over the years. How Arivoli Iyakkam in the southern TN along with a few good collectors helped the districts and the state as whole to drop from the top five poorest states in India gives me some hope. But not everything ends on that positive happy note. Don’t pass the book thinking it is not relevant. After 30 years, it still is.

[Saloni · Rating 5 out of 5]

To my beloved country, I stand disgusted as I understand the meaning behind the title of this book.

Compiled in the early 1990's, no doubt, when I first picked it up, I had my qualms about this book's due relevance today, after almost 30 years. While reading, I kept on thinking that this has to be all part of the history and I am definitely not that incognizant to not have known about these brutal realities that dance naked in our country today. Laughable? Yes, it shockingly is! What popped me out of my dream-bubble were just a few clicks and reads on the internet to establish that how mistaken I was. This book remains timeless. Here I have compiled some of my findings:

India continues to record the highest number of Tuberculosis active cases every year. As of October 2019, India accounted for 27% of the total cases, followed by China (9%), Indonesia (8%), Pakistan (6%) and Bangladesh (4%).

"Never in history have Indian governments spent more than 1.8 percent of GDP on health. India committed 5 percent of the outlay of her first five year plan to health. But this has come down to 1.7 percent by eighth five year plan, falling with each successive plan."

Reality as in FY20(would be 13th fifth-year plan): Expenditure on healthcare as a percentage of GDP is abysmal 1.6%, seeing a small rise from 1.5% in FY19. The government aims a target of 2.5% of the GDP by 2025.

How can we forget about education, huh?(pun intended)

"A free India to spend no less than 10 percent of plan outlay on education. Free India honoured that vision only in the breach. The five Year Plan gave education 7.86 percent of its total outlay. The second plan lowered it to 5.83 percent. By the fifth plan, education was making do with 3.27 percent of the outlay. In the seventh plan, the figure was 3.5 percent."

As of 2019, the education spend being 3% of the GDP laughs mockingly at us.

"Nearly one in every two illiterates in the world is a citizen of this country."

Even in 2017, India has a third of world's illiterates. So much for developments!

The North Koel Dam Project, which remained 'under construction' for 20 years (1972-1993), is said to have closed after 90% of its completion due to the amendment of the Forest (Conservation) Rules 1981 the previous year, which tightened the conditions for getting forest clearances.

Some more reality checks are in order:
Even after three decades, India(2018) still remains one of the countries having the highest number of absolute poor(with 70.6 million, second to only Nigeria wit 87 million). In India, every second child is affected by some form of malnutrition. Among countries in South Asia, India fares the worst (54%) on prevalence of children under five who are either stunted, wasted or overweight. India also has the highest burden of deaths among children under five per year, with over 8 lakh deaths in 2018. It is followed by Nigeria, Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, at 8.6 lakh, 4.09 lakh and 2.96 lakh deaths per year, respectively.

Another thing which I found particularly astonishing was the fearless reporting of the 90's. The Times of India's dauntlessness is nothing less than laudable. What has happened to our media after 30 years of the so-called development?

Today, we need more texts like these and even more and more people in our country to read them, who otherwise may die unaware of the so-called process of development that steps upon million and millions of poor people who don't even get to have a share of that development.

We need to raise some important questions.

- Are the development projects truly beneficial to the tribals or are they merely justified as one?
- Are these projects just to get some funds released?
- Does those thousands of PHC's function outside of paper? And if yes, do they really cater to the simplest needs of the tribals and the adivasis?
- Why even the paltry amounts tossed at health and education are shrinking with each passing year?
- Is our health system built for patients and the public or the doctors, contractors and pharmacists?
- Are the people, for whom the development is carried, victims or beneficiaries?
- How much it takes to rightly compensate(not just in the books) the people for the projects that they didn't even ask for?
- When the people peacefully move out from their lands, homes; resources on which their life depends never even gets considered for compensation; families are split apart, it becomes part of the unseen war that could call out even the impenetrable consciousness, but at the same time, how many people would move out from their South Delhi villas without a making a sound?
- True, there is a price of development, but who bears the cost always?
- Who sacrifices for not getting even a minuscule amount of so-called development? And for whom?
- Why do the least privileged pay such a huge share of the ‘price’. What part of this ‘price’ have the better-off ever borne?
- Why 'drought' makes those districts a contractor's dream?
- Why does everybody loves a good drought?

The crowning irony is that, with a disarming candour, most of the answers would be something which they ideally should never be!

[Mathur Sathya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is going to be one of my all time favorites now.
"... that rural poverty and it's miserable cousin, suburban squalor, most vividly represented by Dalit India, are seen by the power structures of the country as the cause of India's backwardness, when they're, in truth, it's result"

I chose this line because this broadly is the theme of this book. Book is a collection of articles by the author in 90s about conditions of different villages in India. We tend to think of contemporary issues in oversimplified view like "haan agrarian crisis", "deforestation affects tribals". This one shows the variants of those and how they're perpetuated by the ruling class, pouring them on rural people making their constantly nurtured living hell.

First thing I liked about this books is that unlike most writers from highly privileged background who paint class, caste, religious, linguistic etc, oppression with ridiculously huge brush of "poverty", Sainath puts his fingers on each of them in every case and clearly points out which part of the misery is contributed by which one.

Second, book gets darker as the pages turn. At this point many authors tend to get into gruesome details to either romanticize the pain of the people or make poverty porn out of it. This guy doesn't. Reports make you bleed internally and after a point you become numb. Exactly at this point he introduces bunch of stories to give you hope, not a lot, but just enough to let you know there's still scope for you to do something.

This is a must read for everyone, and in particular for people from MP, Odisha, TN, Bihar and Jharkhand. You might learn a lot about your own state that you were previously oblivious to.

PS: A lot of people pointed out to me about Author's supposedly flawed ideologies. But I don't think it matters, this is damn good journalism.

[Kaushik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read about a very curious catch in the way we declare our exam results. Take the PUC(12th) results for example. In Karnataka, about 62% of the 685k students appearing for the exams passed PUC. But there are about 1 million students in the state who should ideally have taken the PUC exam but never reached the PUC level. That means, only 35-40% of PUC-age students in the state are clearing PUC. The grass suddenly does not appear so green now. [1]


This is the kind of perspective and stark reality that Sainath lays down in this book. Gopalakrishna Gandhi puts it rather eloquently in the foreword - "It is a discovery for those who are learning its truth for the first time and a reaffirmation for those whose experience and observation match its compelling testimony."


I'm sure we were all moved by the plight of migrant workers soon as the pandemic hit. Sainath bluntly said in an interview[2], "Urban India didn't care about migrant workers till 26 March, only cares now because it's lost their services". As harsh as it may sound to our sensitive urban ears, that is the fact.


In the book too, Sainath does not beat around the bush. He gets to the point. This succinct direct reportage is what really holds and binds your attention. He does not glorify achievements nor dramatize misery. He presents things as they are - and in today's world that is a rarety.


Why should you read this book? What did I gain from it?
It tuaght me one very very important aspect of rural poverty in India - we cannot look at poverty from the view of "events", a farmer suicide, or a draught is not simply an "event" to report and sensationalize, and then duly forget. We need to understand poverty as a "process". Why do droughts occur? What is being done to prevent them? How does it affect farmers? Why do farmers commit suicide?


I'm sure we all saw the misery of the migrant laborers post the national lockdown as "events" - the press and media did, and it made for a healthy coverage. How many viewed it as a process? Did we try to understand why they migrate? And why in such large numbers? Why can't they find employment in their own villages? It should be clear now how effective this sudden shift in perspective is.


This radical shift is vital to understanding the scale of the problem - and trust me we do not understand the scale of the problem.


This is where Sainath excels. Throughout the book, he does not report "events" but breaks down the processes that lead the poorest of Indians to live the lives they do. And it is enlightening.


Really, I cannot recommend this book enough to you. If you are reading this review, I will humbly request you - if you read one book this year, make it this one. It is necessary that we as citizens with a conscience understand these issues. If not anything, it will make you realise the privilege of your existence, and just how lucky some of us are, and the costs some of our own countrymen pay to provide us this privelege.




[1] https://twitter.com/ashwinmahesh/stat...
[2] https://www.firstpost.com/india/urban...

[Kartik Muthuswamy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me about a week to finish this book- Almost thrice longer than it takes me to finish a book of this length. And that despite the brilliant readability of P. Sainath's works. It's just that hard to get through these pages. This book is not a flowery description of 'Incredible India'- It grabs you by the collar and punches you in the gut. It's not an uncontrolled tirade against the system, it's the why and how of rural poverty in India put in terms of stories, facts and statistics. It's chilling.

All of us have come across the rhetoric of reasons for poverty in rural India- improper implementation of policies, lack of education, farmers debts, social inequalities, etc. But the extent to which the mainstream media covers these is as mere bullet points, or in some extraordinary cases an editorial. The author takes you on a journey to India's most backward districts
- The 2 poorest, in 5 of India's poorest states(during the early 90s). The book revolves around one theme- indifference. Indifference shown by the system, by the elite/privileged and by Everybody else who loves a good drought.

The stories you read are nothing short of horrifying-
About doctors in PHCs practicing in private and forcing tribals to resort to witch medicine.
About sons bonded in labor to usurers to pay back their father's debts(and in one case to get the daughter married) All while the usurer
lends money at 36% interest.
About tribals being displaced twice from their homes to accommodate 'development', and later making them ineligible for the meager compensation they are entitled to.
About a woman 'selling' her 14 year old sister-in-law to pay off debts.
About men toiling for days and being paid in kind- 2 Kgs of rice, and the police assume they stole it. Why? Because they belong to a particular caste.

'Development' in India comes at a price- mostly the sacrifice of poor. And what do the poor get back in return for their sacrifice?
Misery.
There are some stories of incredible resolve shown by villagers, willing officials, and sometimes even the higher ups to better their situation- Like Arivoli Iyakkam in Pudukottai, TN. But how many of these movements are allowed to function they way they're supposed to?
It takes the vested interests of a few people to crush such movements in seconds.
And at the end of it all, you're left with feelings of anger, disgust and helplessness.

[Ragavendra Natarajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was a long time coming, but I finally managed to get around to writing one. This book is special since it is the only book to have left a deep impress on me although I never actually finished the entire book.

The description of the book is fairly bland - it's a collection of newspaper articles written by the journalist P.S Sainath on rural India while he was on a journalism fellowship. However, I literally wept when I read the chapters - each of which is an article from the newspaper 'Times of India'. It chronicles the hardships faced by rural Indians for whom eking out a living is a herculean task, an unending torment. I felt despair and anguish like I never have. I just gave up on the book after completing a few chapters, and eventually left it behind in my old apartment when I moved.

I still recollect some of the stories ever so often. They help me realize how I, as a privileged caste Indian, am lucky, and puts my "achievements” and my “problems” in perspective. They prod me into action to help others, better than any religion or God ever has. They remind me that whatever I achieve is only in part due to my efforts, and largely due to favourable circumstances and the lending hands of numerous others. They remind me that you never realize that the river is aiding you until you swim upstream.

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 3 out of 5]

P.Sainath is one of my heroes ; the last true journalist. This collection of articles which he authored for the Times of India (there is an irony to end all ironies) focused on the farmer suicides that were sweeping the heartlands of India during the prosperous 90's.
Sainath's writing is hit-and-miss ; he falls back occasionally on some cliches. Additionally, the book reads as what it essentially is ; i.e. a collection of newspaper articles. There is no overarching theme, other than the crushing and depressing poverty of the countryside.
But of course, writing is only one part of being a journalist. The moral courage and tenacity to dig up truths which people prefer to ignore gives fluency even to the most rigid pen.

[Kaśyap · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is great journalism, this is a collection of stories from the poorest districts in India, showing how the governments fail to see the reality . even though the research for this was mostly done in 1993-1995, this book is as relevant today as it was more than ten years ago.

[Hrishikesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soul-stirring case studies. P Sainath goes to show that even if there were no corruption, faulty policy-making is going to keep development chained, and our people weak.

[Sudhakar Gupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This really should be made mandatory reading in high school. Not only did I discover a lot of truths about India and its inequalities, this book made me aware of the bubble I have lived in all my life and continue to do so. On the one hand I was ordering a pizza for a thousand rupees just because I didn’t like what was cooked that night; on the other I was reading about entire families who didn’t earn that much in a month and often went without food for days.

Mr Sainath isn’t just writing about a few random human stories that he chanced upon, nor did these people end up in this state due to any misfortune or natural calamity. Instead, he simply and systematically exposes the process deficiencies and unchecked exploitation that have caused these few stories to swell into hundreds of millions of data points. As is often the case, the bigger the number, the easier it becomes to ignore.

I, for one, despite thinking of myself as a conscientious citizen, have been criminally ignorant of the extent of this inequality.

[Nishant Chaudhary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book to understand my country better. Sainath covers issues of health, education, livelihood among others across select districts in Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. He deliberately chose the most backward districts to question the idea of development. He looks at the impact of the 'system' on lives of the poor - right from how it defines them to how it makes their lives better (or worse). The 'system' here includes politicians, bureaucrats, media, NGOs, funding agencies and how they work together. Sainath Sainath writes as he speaks - listen to any speech of his on youtube and you can make out the characteristic sarcasm.
While the book contains accounts from the 1990s, it is as relevant today as it was then. Towards the end, Sainath is prescient in his views on the apathy of media to rural India. Things have simply become worse and they do not seem to be improving anytime soon.

[Ashok Krishna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am afraid that this book will stay relevant for a long time to come!

[Proctoor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening and bleak

[Utkarsh Sankhla · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I liked:
1) This book reminded me of my TISS days and readings.
2) Sometimes, we need reminders on the bubble we live in and the plight of people outside this bubble. Sainath does just that

What I didnt like:
The fact that the book is 20 years old, meaning that current facts and figures for our welfare report cards require a reader to research himself/herself.

[Hiran Venugopalan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read.