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Everybody Loves a Good Drought, the best-selling 1997 book by Palagummi Sainath, had a profound effect on me. It made me appreciate what quality journalism can do for a society and motivated me to take up a career as a journalist.

In its almost 400 pages, the book investigates rural life in India's ten poorest districts, giving accounts of the forgotten faces of rural poverty. As a student at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, I was fortunate to have Sainath as an adjunct faculty member who taught a course about covering deprivation. He encouraged us to ask the right questions and inculcated critical thinking. The class was held spellbound as he spoke with passion about the continued deteriorating condition of farmers and the abysmal work of the media in covering their issues.

Sainath was recently awarded the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award in journalism, literature, and the creative communication arts. The Ramon Magsaysay awards are presented every year to commemorate the third president of the Philippines, and to promote integrity, idealism and courage. Mother Teresa, the Director General of India's Bureau of Police Research and Development, Kiran Bedi, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, editor Arun Shourie, and cartoonist R.K. Laxman are among the award's previous honorees.

Sainath, who serves as the rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, spoke with AsiaMedia in a telephone interview from Mumbai about the agrarian crisis, lack of government intervention and his future projects.

The following is an edited transcript.

AsiaMedia: Congratulations on winning the Ramon Magsaysay award.

P. Sainath: Thank you.

AM: You have been writing extensively on the agriculture sector for the last 20 years. Do you see any improvement in the condition of farmers?

PS: The condition of the farmers has deteriorated. There may have been relief here and there on account of subsidies, but the basic policies of the government remain unchanged. Those policies are hurtful to the interest of small farmers and favor large corporations which are thinking about coming into farming on a full scale. Public investment in the agriculture sector has collapsed. It has declined through the 90s and through the decade of 2000, and has not been remedied by the private sector. There is an anti-farmer bias to the policy. Development expenditure as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) is about half of what it was in the late 1980s.

When Vishwanath Pratap Singh was the prime minister, the development expenditure, the share of GDP was 14.5 percent; however by 2005 it has fallen down sharply to 5.9 percent that is less than half. In cash terms it is a fall of Rs30,000 crores (US$7.14 billion). If you have an investment falling of Rs30,000 crores a year you are talking about an income loss of Rs120,000 to 150,000 crores a year, which means somewhere between US$20-26 billion of income rural India is losing each year. According to me you may as well send the air force and bomb the country side, it will be more cost efficient and it would cost less lasting damage.

AM: Why do you think the government has not introduced any agro-friendly policies or shielded the farmers from global volatility and increasing investment in the field?

PS: The government, in its wisdom, feels that there are too many people dependent on agriculture and that it needs to chase them off their land. So it is using this policy structure that will force people off their land. But when they [farmers] go to the cities there aren't any jobs there. They are leading the villagers to the towns and cities where there are no jobs because the factories are closed and the mills are shut down. So they are going through a peculiar state which is neither peasant nor working class -- they are coming there to be your domestic servants.

There are two lakh (200,000) adivasi [indigenous] girls from just the state of Jharkhand working as domestic servants in Delhi facing extremely low wages, survival problems and, of course, a great degree of sexual harassment. This is the future we have envisioned for these kids. The government feels that agriculture will be much more efficient and much better with fewer farmers and more corporations. There are 600 million people dependent on agriculture so they want to make it less and they think the way to go is to introduce corporate farming.

Now, corporate farming creates no jobs. Agriculture is not something you should see purely in terms of output but you should also see it in terms of livelihoods. They are destroying the existing livelihoods without creating sustenance. I would also like to find alternatives for the many people who wish to leave agriculture but they haven't done so.

AM: What measures can prevent this cycle of crop failure and lift debt pressure from the farmers?

PS: The government is aware of the remedies and it set up a national commission, whose former chairman was MS Swaminathan. The commission reports captured the condition brilliantly and tell you what the remedies are. It asks for a number of measures, like the restoring of public investment and intake in agriculture to the 1991 level. It asks for the creation of a price stabilization fund, because the volatility of prices, more than anything else, and the debts was what was killing the farmers. It also asks for low-interest loans and no-interest loans, like China is giving her farmers.

And also [the commission asks for] action against western input. For example cotton from United States -- which has gone up to 1 million bales -- has tripled. The United States is dumping 1 million bales on what is perhaps the home of cotton in the world. But the government hasn't raised the duty on cotton one bit, though we are entitled [to do so] under the WTO. So you have an outrageous situation where the all the measures are known to the government but they won't do them.

AM: Why is there a lack of media interest in the field?

PS: Media coverage has been nothing short of disgraceful. This happens when you have a monopoly media who equates journalism with revenue. Media is driven solely by profits rather than good journalism. You have less than six journalists covering the Vidharbha [agrarian] crisis in the middle of 2006, but you have more than 500 journalists covering the Lakhme India fashion week in Mumbai. They don't believe Vidharbha farmers make revenue for them.

You don't have newspapers having agriculture correspondents and most newspapers don't even have labour correspondents, which mean 70 percent of the country does not make news. If you don't have correspondents for the beat, it is very clear what your attitude is. Media is completely driven by Bollywood and trivia which generates more revenue, therefore they are not showing any interest in the issue. This attitude is extremely dangerous for media, democracy and the people.

AM: What do you think about the U.S. media's reporting and Indian media's reporting? Also do you see the emerging technologies bridging the news gap?

PS: About the only time I think kindly of the Indian media is when I am in United States. We follow the U.S. model of journalism but we just haven't got that quality yet. I think the reporting in U.S. media about India has been significantly characterized by the hallelujah stuff that goes around. The world isn't flat: its vision is.

We don't have a wired society; the blog world and Internet penetration is still very low. However, new forms like blogs could play a positive role, but not everybody who possesses a blog has the best of intentions. There are, though, exceptions like Indiatogether.com, which has played a good role.

AM: What new projects are you working on?

PS: I am continuing to work on the agrarian crisis. The new project that I am working on is about the last living freedom fighters. I have already done some interviews a few years ago. I am also creating a rural archive of India with the prize money. The archive will record all the professions, trades and occupations which will disappear years from now -- like the streetside knife sharpener, the toddy tapper, the manual irrigator and village blacksmith. It will be print, audio, video, online. Another would be an archive of the last living freedom fighters, the foot soldiers, the ordinary people, not the famous ones, so that a hundred years from now our children can see who fought for freedom and talk about them.

AM: Thank you very much sir.

PS: Thank you.

Source: AsiaMedia