P Sainath, honoured with this year’s Ramon
BY: Naz AsgarhNew Delhi: Magsaysay Award for his “passionate commitment to restore the rural poor to India’s consciousness” today said structural inequalities were the main cause of the failure of all poverty removal programmes since independence and the situation has been exacerbated by the economic reforms.
”And as a journalist, I find the scenario more painful when I see a disconnect between mass media and mass reality,” Mr Sainath told UNI.
Rural poverty is not a disease but a result of structural
inequalities which have been only strengthened by the ruthless working of the market forces, said Sainath, the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu.
The small farmer is being driven out of the rural scene,
emerging in some city as a rootless domestic worker, as the government was pursuing a policy of corporatisation of farming, he said. And it was unfortunate that these developments devastating the lives of millions are not finding as prominent a place in our national media as they deserve to, said Sainath who had intensively toured India’s ten poorest districts under a fellowship and tried to gain an in-depth understanding of the causes of poverty.
The fruits of his labour have appeared in the form of his best selling book ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought,’ and hundreds of articles.
During those years, Sainath found that the cause of poverty in those districts was not the drought but structural inequalities.
Elaborating, he said in the last 60 years, no state except three or four have carried out land reforms, and the Government has not made any serious efforts to end land monopolies.
No efforts have been made to give the tribals rights over their forests, though only as late as this year a tribal rights bill has been passed.
The concentration of wealth has been increasing and today a handful of the population was enjoying a standard of living it had never dreamt of, while the majority were witnessing a fall in their standard of living they had never expected, he said.
”Moreover, we have not been able to remove caste discrimination.These are the areas where the Indian state has failed,” he said.
Replying to a question, he said that though he would not say that India should remain completely untouched by the process of globalisation, it should certainly enter the club on its own terms and not on its knees.
” We could very well be part of globalisation without allowing the United States to dump one billion bales of its highly subsidised cotton,” he said.
The US produced cotton worth 3.9 billion dollars last year but the subsidy on it was worth 4.7 billion dollars. This cheap cotton was being dumped in developing countries crashing the prices of home-grown cotton and leading to farmers’ suicides, he added.
”In fact, what has happened is that India has traded the interest of its farmers at WTO in return for the benefit of a few thousand software personnel,” Sainath said.
Today, a rural family was consuming much less quantity of
food grains than it was doing about ten years ago, Sainath said.
Replying to a question about the Nehruvian model, he said
one might find fault with that model but it was far less damaging to the country’s people and economy than the present liberalised market-driven model.
Moreover, it was under the Nehruvian model that India made progress in several sectors, he added.
The present model was only increasing inequalities and destroying the livelihood of the majority of people, as the government trying to introduce corporatisation of agriculture.
”One gets really perturbed when one thinks what would happen to those displaced farmers when they would not find job in any factories which are fast closing or downsizing,” Sainath said.
India could very well follow a third model and for that it
does not have to go very far. It is there in the directive
principles of the state policy contained in the Constitution,he added.
Answering questions on the Green Revolution, Sainath vehemently opposed intensive fertiliser based farming. Chemical-based agriculture was playing havoc with the soil as it was water intensive. It was because of this that there was so much water crisis in Punjab which was in the forefront of the Green revolution.
He, however, believes that the Green revolution was not all because of fertilisers and high yielding varieties. A major reason was the banks, after nationalisation, made credit available to small farmers who could not get it from private banks earlier.
Coming back to the issue of the mass media and rural poverty, he said it was not that the print media was completely innocent and had sidelined the people’s issues only under the influence of the visual media.
Even in the early 1990s, the initial years of reforms, there were fewer papers giving due place to agrarian issues. They were flooded with matters of interest to only a handful of people who benefited from these reforms, he said.
Though the print media did not go to such extremes as the
electronic media in covering the trivia and sensationalising any event, it should certainly do some introspection whether it was adequately playing the role it was expected of, Sainath added.
”A few days ago, a national newspaper carried on its front page the news about a man in Punjab paying Rs 15 lakh for getting a unique number for his cell phone. But very few people know that today the average per capita income of a farm household is only Rs 503, of which 53 per cent is spent on food, as this data would not make it
to the front page,” he said.
This distance between the media and the masses was reflected in the physical inaccessibility of a newspaper’s editors for the people.
”Today, if you go to a newspaper office, you would have to
pass through various stages of security before you can reach its editor. In the past it was not so difficult for a common man at these places,” he said.
Sainath also felt that the contract system was destroying the journalists’ unions and consequently their freedom. ”It is in fact a violation of the Working Journalists Act,” he added.//EOM//
