Review

Reviewed Work(s): Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest
Districts by P. Sainath
Review by: Harry Blair
Source: Pacific Affairs , Spring, 2000, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 133-134
Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672310

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 Pacific Affairs

series of stories on rural poverty. Sainath spent the next couple of years
focusing on a number of particularly backward districts in the poorest regions
of the country - two each in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and
four in Orissa. The result is some sixty-nine stories, most of which appeared
in the Times of India, winning the author a series of awards (thirteen of
them, says a cover blurb) and giving us a fascinating set of glimpses of India's
poor scraping by on virtually nothing.
Kishan Yadav employs an old bicycle to push a 250-kilogram load of coal
on three-day trips in order to earn Rs 30 in Bihar, at least when he is healthy
enough to undertake thejourney. In neighboring Orissa, Amru Majhi earns
Rs 9 per day by carrying almost two tons of bricks between kiln and stocking
yard. And in the Surguja District of Madhya Pradesh, the terrain and its
population are so poor that even the lowly bullock cart is not economically
viable: there is not enough produce grown tojustify an animal-drawn vehicle,
so everything is carried by human headload.
Sainath finds an occasional government program intended to ameliorate
poverty, but none seem to work to that end. And some are mindlessly
destructive. One effort in Orissa replaced the sturdy local cattle with an exotic
breed that soon wilted and died, while another in Bihar's non-functioning
public health centers means that medical trade goes to moonlighting doctors
or more often to quacks who treat everything with a saline drip solution.
Most of Sainath's stories are interesting, and a few are even moving.
They are a good set of stories, but in the end they are just that: sixty-nine
stories, generally about eight hundred words long (the length of a feature
story in the Times of India), each about a discrete situation, with nothing
holding them together except the general themes of poverty, greed and
government ineptitude. The author tries to tie things together at the end
with an analysis of poverty coverage by the press. It can cover events, he
agrees, but fails at covering processes, especially the processes that produce
and maintain poverty. But this is carping more than it is serious analysis; the
media, afterall, don't cover quotidian poverty very well anywhere - this is
not solely an India problem. As a collection of newspaper articles, then, the
book is a very good one and provides a view of Indian life its readers would
never otherwise see. As a coherent picture of poverty in India, it is lacking.
Journalism has some distinct limits, and here we see them.

Bucknell University, Lewisburg, U.S.A. HARRY BLAIR

134

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