Talking India Series
10th February
Palagummi Sainath: The agrarian crisis and farmer suicides in India
Date: Friday, 10th February 2012
Time: 12:30 PM
Where: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St, Ultimo), Level 5, Room 425 (China Research Centre Meeting Room)
RSVP: Lola.Davidson@uts.edu.au
About the paper: Over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have taken their lives between 1995 and 2010 according to the National Crime Records Bureau, a part of the country’s Union Home Ministry. This is the largest single wave of suicides within an occupational group ever recorded. Millions have also quit agriculture altogether. The reports of the National Commission of Farmers on the issue lie untouched and undiscussed in Parliament. Yet, India’s agrarian crisis is poilcy-driven - and set to get worse.
About The Speaker: Palagummi Sainath, or P. Sainath as he is popularly known, is India’s most highly-awarded journalist with over 40 international and national awards for his investigative and social sector reporting. He is the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu – a 133-year-old daily with a circulation of over 1.6 million. Sainath was the first Indian journalist in 25 years to win the Ramon Magsaysay Prize in 2007 for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness.” He won the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization’s Boerma Prize in 2001 and was the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Award. Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought, now in its 33rd printing, has remained a Penguin non-fiction best-seller for years.
