P Sainath

Journalist | Author | Columnist | Ramon Magsaysay Award Winner

About: P Sainath is an Indian columnist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He is a journalist, founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the inaugural World Media Summit Global Award for Excellence 2014 in Public Welfare for exemplary news professionals in developing countries. He has extensively written on rural India, poverty, structural inequities, caste discrimination and farmers’ protests. His work at the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) focuses on social and economic inequality, rural affairs, poverty, and the aftermath of globalization in India. He founded the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) in 2014, an online platform that focuses on social and economic inequality, rural affairs, poverty, and the aftermath of globalization in India. He was a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and was earlier the Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu until his resignation in 2014. He has received many awards for his journalism. The economist Amartya Sen called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger". His book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, is a collection of his field reports as a journalist, and focuses on different aspects of rural deprivation in India.

BOOK

Name: The Last Heroes

Description:

So who really spearheaded India’s Freedom Struggle? Millions of ordinary people-farmers, labourers, homemakers, forest produce gatherers, artisans and others-stood up to the British. People who never went on to be ministers, governors, presidents, or hold other high public office.

They had this in common: their opposition to Empire was uncompromising.

In The Last Heroes, these footsoldiers of Indian freedom tell us their stories. The men, women and children featured in this book are Adivasis, Dalits, OBCs, Brahmins, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. They hail from different regions, speak different languages and include atheists and believers, Leftists, Gandhians and Ambedkarites.

The people featured pose the intriguing question: What is freedom? They saw that as going beyond Independence. And almost all of them continued their fight for freedoms long after 1947.

The post-1947 generations need their stories.

To learn what they understood. That freedom and independence are not the same thing. And to learn to make those come together.