Everybody Loves a Good Drought

Everybody loves a good drought
First edition
AuthorP. Sainath
LanguageEnglish
GenreSocial
Published1996
PublisherPenguin
Publication placeIndia
Pages470 (Paperback edition)
ISBN0-14-025984-8 (Paperback edition)
OCLC36806980
823 21
LC ClassHC440.P6 S245 1996

Everybody Loves a Good Drought is a book, by P. Sainath, about his research findings of poverty in the rural districts of India. The book won him the Ramon Magsaysay Award.[1][2][3]

Sainath wrote the book by combining 84 articles that he had written from 1990 to 1992 for the Times of India, while residing in the poorest villages in the interiors of India, especially Tamil Nadu, what today is referred to as Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and what is today referred to as Chhattisgarh on a two-year Bennett and Coleman fellowship.[4] The articles give extensive detail of how various government projects do and do not work at the ground level, and whether they actually deliver any of their promised results in reality. He wrote the stories by detailing out the projects as well as the lives of villagers living in these places, supplementing them with detailed statistics.[5]

Divided into separate sections based on the issues that the chapters deal with, the book scathingly unveils how trickle up and down theories do not work in reality in the country, and the stunningly high levels of corruption in so called development projects.[6]

The book is considered one of the most detailed, authentic, highly regarded and readable studies of 1980s rural India.[7]

To make rural stories more accessible, excerpts from the book have been also published on People's Archive of Rural India.[8]

  1. ^ "News Pages". Development in Action. Archived from the original on 10 August 2007.
  2. ^ Singh, Bhupinder. "Book review - Everybody loves a good drought". bhupindersingh.ca. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  3. ^ "P Sainath wins Magsaysay Award". Times of India. 1 August 2007. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  4. ^ Sainath, P. Preface - Everybody loves a good drought. Penguin India.
  5. ^ "Reviews of Everybody loves a good drought". psainath.org/. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  6. ^ "P.Sainath is a bitter man - and he has every reason to be bitter". The Metro Reader. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  7. ^ "Indian media facing credibility deficit: P Sainath". Hindustan Times. 12 August 2015. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  8. ^ "The Hills of Hardship". People's Archive of Rural India.