Investigating Inequality: A Workshop with P. Sainath

Inequality is a burning issue everywhere, but how does successful reporting on inequality happen? In this workshop, award-winning Indian journalist P. Sainath brings his 40 years of experience to bear on an open discussion of reporting inequality focused on a basic question: how does a reporter get people to talk about inequality?

Sainath will draw on his experiences at The Hindu—a major English-language daily founded in 1878 and one of India's newspapers of record—to help shape a wide-ranging conversation around investigation. In the process, Sainath will draw upon his seminal journalism that brought national and international attention to farmer suicides in India during the 1990s and 20002, how The Hindu dealt with reporting agitations and protests of poor and marginalized communities while he was its rural affairs editor, and how his platform The People's Archive of Rural India strives to produce stories through the voices and lived experience of everyday people, including on climate change. 

The workshop will be followed by a South Asian lunch buffet.

Palagummi Sainath is an Indian journalist who focuses on inequality, deprivation and poverty, particularly in rural India. He is the recipient of over 75 national and global awards for journalism. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s largest newspapers.

More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides—over 400,000 in two decades since 1995—on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture and more. PARI has won 106 journalism awards and honors. Sainath is now the A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.