People's Archive of Rural India

A chat with P. Sainath

On a recent Sunday in New York City I sat down with P. Sainath to talk, among other things, about the worn-out chappals of the working poor. The photo-essay I had read began with the words: “Working class people treasure even worn-out sandals. The sandals of cargo loaders bear dents and concave inner soles, while woodcutters' chappals are riddled with thorns. My own slippers I've often patched up with safety pins to keep them intact.” This photo-essay by M. Palani Kumar had appealed to me when I had seen it on the website of the People’s Archive of Rural India—Sainath is the founder editor of that network. Sainath is famous also as the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, a book that offered a detailed portrait of poverty in India in the nineteen eighties. The book won for Sainath the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

When I caught up with him, Sainath had just completed his stint as a visiting professor at Cornell; I was meeting him in order to acquire a sense of how the People’s Archive carries out granular, grassroots reporting on the realities of Indian life. Which brings us back to the photo-essay on sandals. Sainath said that the photographer for the story, Palani Kumar, is the son of agricultural laborers, the first literate graduate in his immediate family. Sainath wanted me to take note of many other remarkable stories that Palani Kumar has documented: for example, the women who are the seaweed harvesters of Tamil Nadu; how fish taught him photography; the life of a 77-year-old-woman who catches prawns each day for her livelihood; and a long essay on the day-to-day struggles of his own mother. Palani Kumar has been running a photography workshop for the daughters of manual scavengers and others. Sainath said of Kumar, “See, his empathy comes naturally. It’s not trained and tutored like the rest of us.”

What was the main motivation for starting the People’s Archive of Rural India? When I asked this question, Sainath said that 69 % of the population in India lives in rural areas. Yet, a study of leading mainstream media shows that the average national daily gives only 0.67% of the front-page of editorial space to this vast population. The inside pages give more attention and columns to crime and entertainment than to issues like food, nutrition, health, etc. Sainath has completed 44 years in journalism. When he started in that line, every newspaper had a labor and employment correspondent—and today there isn’t a single one. Most stories in every paper come from six to eight towns with New Delhi providing 66% of the datelines and Mumbai coming second.

The neoliberal economists will say that there are too many people in agriculture. They need to be moved. But where and to do what? A farmer displaced from his traditional land won’t be given a job at Infosys except in their canteen where people can be served by an ex-farmer. When Sainath was writing about the farmer suicides (they had numbered around 200,000), these same economists had said that this number is a very low percentage of the total population. (If that is a low percentage why are so worried about the 20,000 dead in the Bhopal gas tragedy, Sainath asked rhetorically.) In the process of reporting on these suicides by farmers, he visited about 900 households mostly spread across what were at that time five states (and are now seven) that accounted for more than 70% of these deaths. The unmourned and also uncounted deaths of the poor—this was a subject on which Sainath had more to say. Most assessments of the number of the deaths from Covid in India were over 4 million (Lancet estimated 4.2 million deaths, WHO said that 4.7 million had died in India, the Center for Global Development put the figure at 4.9 million) but the official figures of the Indian government claimed that the number of deaths were ten times less and Prime Minister Modi had declared himself Vishwa Guru or World Teacher on the subject of vaccines.

Sainath said that not even one editorial in India challenged the government’s figures. The task of reporting truthfully on rural lives means telling the world that the country has lost 15 million main cultivators in the past 20 years—it means that 15 million people have quit agriculture at the rate of over 2000 a day. I had earlier asked Sainath in an email about the Prime Minister’s claims that India had surplus grains. He told me now that malnutrition is the highest cause of death in India among children under the age of five. We rank 111 out of 125 nations in the Global Hunger Index. And we rank 178 out of 180 nations in the environmental performance index. (I checked this figure. India ranks 176 out of 180 countries, a slight improvement since 2022 when it ranked last.) But there is one thing for which the ruling party can indeed take credit, Sainath told me. And this is that India now has over 200 billionaires. (It was difficult to keep up with all these numbers that Sainath had at his fingertips—the net worth of these billionaires, how it compared with the country’s total budget expenditure, etc.—numbers that he spat out with practiced ease like a Brahmin chanting his Vedic verses.) I told Sainath that I had read and liked his tweets about the Ambani wedding. Sainath was now on a tear. He said that during the twelve months of Covid, India produced a new billionaire every nine days. In that period, India’s GDP fell by 7.7 %, but the billionaires doubled their wealth. Sainath asked, “Where did that wealth come from?” and answered, “It was sucked up from below.”

How does the People’s Archive of Rural India work to report on the realities of Indian life? When I repeated this question Sainath said that “millions of Indian kids over the last 20-30 years have been growing up as foreigners in their own country.” The workers at the People’s Archive are those young people who want to come home. The average age of those working there is 22 to 24 years. If there was no rural India, the claim to diversity in India would be dead. At the People’s Archive, there is an active promotion of diversity with reports being published on all working days in 15 languages. With the aid of more than 310 translators, half of them volunteers, others often working for a pittance, reports are translated into all the 15 languages. The People’s Archive focuses on the everyday lives of everyday people. The people’s own experiences and voices matter, not the reporter’s. Any reporter who does a story about going out in the field and emoting about how he or she felt on seeing livelihoods collapsing won’t last in the People’s Archive. Sainath said, “I didn’t send you two thousand two hundred kilometers away to write about your fucking emotions.”

With those stirring words let me bring my own report to a stop. The last quote by Sainath is something I’m wrestling with in the Nature Writing class I’m teaching: how to move students away from their feelings and pay greater attention to the havoc being wrought in the world. I’ll deal with that problem but please go ahead and read more about the People’s Archive of India by accessing their website or, if you want, by searching the catalog at the Library of Congress. I must now return to reading for class. Take care, friends in Florida. (Steven, I’m thinking about you.)