Case Study: P Sainath's Reporting from Rural India

This case study will take you through a journey of uncovering rural deprivation through the reporting of a renowned journalist - Palagummi Sainath.

When P. Sainath, a journalist and editor working on rural issues, got a fellowship from the Times of India to cover the marginalised, he set out on a journey that covered 100,000 kilometres through the poorest districts of India. 

In 84 reports published in the Times of India over 18 months, Sainath covered the striking ground realities that spoke of policy failure, the government’s apathy and the agrarian crisis of India that developed after the economic ‘reforms’ of 1991. Let’s hear more about his journey in the next video. 

P. Sainath’s reporting had a great impact on grassroots journalism and taught several journalists how to use databases in order to uncover policy limitations. This video helped you understand how Sainath’s work and the subsequent online repository of information, called People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), became one of the most important resources for rural journalism in India.

In the next video, you will learn about some of his strategic approaches to writing. 

In the video, you learnt about some of the writing strategies implemented by P. Sainath, which are as follows:

• Extensive field-work
• Detailed note-taking
• Using photographs to humanise a story
• Leading with a story
• Using striking comparisons to give the big picture

Sainath’s stories always had leads that piqued the interests of many readers. While talking about the unfinished Kutku Dam from Palamau region in Latehar district of Bihar (now Jharkhand), Sainath leads with the following paragraph: “It’s a dam that is still ‘under construction’, after twenty years. Estimated in 1972 to cost Rs 58 crores, the North Koel project or Kutku dam as they call it here, would cost over 425 crores. That is more than three times Bihar’s irrigation budget this year. If completed, the Kutku dam will bring little water to Palamau, which has suffered drought through the past three decades. It will irrigate less than 6,800 hectares in this district and generate little over 20 MW of electrical power.”