Slumdogs versus Millionaires

Public Lecture with PALAGUMMI SAINATH, renowned Indian journalist, and documentary screening.
PALAGUMMI SAINATH, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s most prestigious prize (and often referred to as the ‘Asian Nobel’), for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts. He was given the award for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness.” He was the first Indian to win the Magsaysay in that category in nearly 25 years. He was also the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International’s Global  Human Rights Journalism Prize in its inaugural year in 2000. His other awards include: the United Nation’s Food & Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Boerma Prize (the foremost award for development journalism) in 2000; the Harry Chapin Media Award in New York, 2006; and was the first and only print media journalist until now to win the Inspiration Award at the Global Visions Film Festival in Edmonton, Canada in 2002. He was also the first Indian reporter to win the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Prize for journalism in 1995. In a 30-year career as a journalist, Sainath has won close to 40 global and national awards for his reporting (though he has turned down several, including one of India’s highest civilian awards, which he declined because, in his view, journalists should not be receiving awards from governments they cover and critique). These include the 2009 ‘Journalist of the Year’ (Ramnath Goenka Prize for Excellence in Journalism). Almost the entire amount from his awards goes towards prizes for other journalists or to support his other projects (see below).
Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin India, 1996) has remained a non-fiction bestseller by an Indian author for years. Working on this book involved covering 100,000-km across India. Sainath used 16 forms of transport for this, and walked over 5,000 km on foot. It has been published in multiple editions and in several languages. The book is in its 31st printing and is presently being used in over 100 universities in India and overseas. In the late nineties, Nikhil Chakravartty, India’s then senior-most editor, described Sainath’s work as “the conscience of the Indian nation.” In 2000, the leading Scandinavian publishing house, Ordfront, included one of Sainath’s reports in its volume: Best Reporting of the 20th Century. In doing so, Ordfront chose to feature his work alongside that of giants like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed. All royalties from the book go towards funding two to three prizes for rural journalists in India each year.