It's the news, stupid.

If you’re going to blame poverty on anyone, blame it on everyone.

That’s what Palgummi Sainath seemed to say at a talk he gave at Columbia University three weeks ago. A reporter on agriculture and poverty in India, Sainath had a lot to say – and a lot to be angry about.

For one, he didn’t hide his exasperation at the ambiguity of an already elusive definition of poverty. The ABCs of development study teach us precisely that there is no ruling definition of poverty, something to keep in mind when reading about the latest statistics on poverty. The official poverty line in India is 24 cents a day, but 77 per cent of the Indian population lives on less than 20 rupees a day. This large discrepancy between statistics and reality is exactly what drove Sainath’s animated talk. The headlines in India are not growth or a booming IT market. It’s poverty, and everything else that comes with it, such as the farmers’ suicide that have been taking over the country.

It is perhaps the limits of journalists that we can only talk, and not really implement policy. But according to Sainath, that’s all it takes to start change. As much as he is frustrated with India’s policies to alleviate poverty, his gripe is as much with journalists as with policy-makers.

“There is more energy in journalism than ever but there is also the most moral bankruptcy in leadership ever,” Sainath said. What he means is that while fashion, murder, caste, religion, and the booming economy makes for popular reading, newspapers in India have failed to provide full time beats on poverty, housing or primary education. Furthermore, no major newspaper in India has a full-time labor correspondent on board.

According to Sainath, this sends a clear message: “it says we are not interested in talking to 70 per cent of the population.”

The point finally sunk in when Sainath animatedly relayed the crux of this argument to his completely engrossed audience. While 512 journalists were covering fashion week in India last spring, only six journalists were covering farmers’ suicide a one-hour flight away. These suicides would have been creating headlines on their own – they were occurring one every six hours. But the final irony was this: the models at fashion week were showing off cotton garments.

This does not only point to a flaw in policy-making in India, but also a flaw in character. Sainath is perhaps one of the few reporters who actively criticize India for more than the growing inequality that accompanies the growing economy. Beyond the commercials of “I love India” laden in “traditional values”, mom’s never-forgotten home-cooked food, and unbreakable family bonds, lies a country that systematically and institutionally ignores 70 per cent of its population that is struggling to survive. There is, essentially, a moral vacuum when it comes to economic policies.

India is experiencing the largest sustained suicide trend, but as Sainath tells us, no system or higher order is working for these farmers. Instead, everything has become privatized. And government and aid policies help insofar as they encourage farmers to diversify their crops. The problem: globalization has raised cultivation costs. Whereas the cost of cultivating vanilla used to be $1.00/kg, it has increased to an appalling $100/kg. In India, Sainath says, “there is privatization of everything, including intellect and soul.”


Journalists wait for news to happen, for democracy to shine and people to rise up to injustice. But Sainath says this is not possible – don’t wait for a social revolution from the farmers when their primary concern is survival. News does not have to be larger than life to be written. It just has to be someone’s life, like the suicide farmers now who, probably unprecedented in India’s history, address their suicide notes to the PM and Chief Minister.

While Sainath may have had his own notions about what policies India’s government could enact to address rural poverty and the growing number of farmers’ suicides, he ultimately addressed the group that he can really influence: journalists. It is not enough to debate the trend of the journalism industry in India, or discuss how it fares compared to the rest of the world. Indian journalists have a duty to cover the biggest, and most often ignored, issue in the country. However, because this has failed to happen, Sainath says, “India has failed in democracy.”