Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts, Volume 10

Front Cover
Penguin Books, 1996 - Social Science - 470 pages

Acclaimed across the world, prescribed in over 100 universities and colleges, and included in part in The Century's Greatest Reportage (Ordfront, 2000), alongside the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural poverty in India. Twenty years after publication, it remains unsurpassed in the scope and depth of reportage, providing an intimate view of the daily struggles of the poor and the efforts, often ludicrous, made to uplift them.

An illuminating introduction accompanying this twentieth-anniversary edition reveals, alarmingly, how a large section of India continues to suffer in the name of development so that a small percentage may prosper. Besides exposing chronic misgovernance, it is also a devastating comment on the media's failure to speak for the voiceless.

Other editions - View all

About the author (1996)

Palagummi Sainath (born 1957) is an Indian journalist and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermath of globalization in India. He was the Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu before resigning in 2014, and the website India Together has been archiving some of his work in The Hindu daily for the past six years. Amartya Sen has called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger". Since late 2011, he has been working on People's Archive of Rural India, PARI, for which he is the Founding Editor. In June 2011, Sainath was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (DLitt) by the University of Alberta, the university's highest honor. He is one of few Indians to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, which he accepted in 2007 in the category of Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts.

Bibliographic information