The Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia

Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia

The Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia

presents

Countryside in Crisis: Why the

poor hate Market Fundamentalism

P. Sainath

Tuesday, June 5, 2001

6:30pm, Bldg. 4 - 231,

MIT

77 Mass Ave, Cambridge

P. Sainath is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. The book which won 13 awards, including the European Commission's Journalism Award, is a chronicle of the living conditions in the ten poorest districts of India. For two years Sainath lived amongst these communities. He traveled across India, often on foot, in hill areas, drought-prone areas, and tribal areas to put the issue of poverty back on the national agenda.

In Everybody Loves a Good Drought Sainath tells "stories of extreme deprivation, but also of the enormous dignity of the poor. Stories of silent and invisible hunger, of incredibly exploitative networks, of unseen and cruel usury, but also of breathtaking, often exemplary survival strategies of the poor."

Sainath is currently working on caste discrimination in India. His work on the Dalits has earned him the Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism prize, the B. D. Goenka Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship.

Cosponsored by

The South Asia Forum at MIT Seminar
ASHA, MIT
AID, Boston

For more information contact asur@mit.edu