The India We Ignore

Palagummi Sainath’s classic should be mandatory reading.

- Mandar M Bakre

Everybody Loves a Good Drought excels by painting vividly the picture of an India that we sense exists, but tend to ignore.

Its author, Palagummi Sainath, a journalist who won the Magsaysay Award in 2007, knows (and understands) rural India like few others. In this book, he shows us the reality of poverty. As he says in the Introduction: “Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions.” His aim, says Sainath, was “to look at [poverty]… conditions in terms of processes.”

Take the story of the Balimela hydroelectric project, which explains how a ‘development process’ can generate poverty. It came up in the 1960s on the Machkund River in Odisha. The reservoir drowned 91 villages, but even more damningly, isolated 152 of them in an area so remote it was officially called the ‘cut-off-area’. Removed from their original forests and with official reparations either denied or delayed, the residents were unable to resurrect the life they had.