Expertise in: Rural and agrarian issues, social inequality, poverty, famine and hunger.

P. Sainath, a Magsaysay Award winner, is a veteran Indian journalist who focuses on social and economic inequality, deprivation, and poverty, particularly in rural India. Amartya Sen has called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger.”  Though the recipient of over 60 national and global awards for journalism, Sainath has also declined several – including the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award in 2009 – as he believes “journalists should never accept prizes and rewards from the governments they cover and critique.” In 2021, he declined the Rs. 1 million YSR award from the government of Andhra Pradesh (he is a member of their AGRI mission, where he serves pro bono).

Sainath was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in Fall 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by the University of Alberta at Edmonton and the St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. In India, he has taught journalism for 36 years. His book Everybody Loves a Good Drought now in its 61st print was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013. His new book The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom has hit a fourth print within 7 months.

A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since then spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s largest newspapers, including The Times of India and for The Hindu (of which he was Rural Editor for a decade). More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides – well 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 a lot more. PARI, which publishes in 15 languages, is a totally independent, free-access multimedia digital platform creating a unique database, wholly dedicated to rural India. It is entirely free of both governmental and corporate control. It has won 60 national and global awards in just 8 years.