The Hindu : National : "Poor media coverage of agrarian crisis"

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Dec 22, 2004

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National

"Poor media coverage of agrarian crisis"

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, DEC. 21. The country is facing a major agrarian crisis, but the media reportage hardly reflects this, says P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu.

He was delivering the keynote address at the awards function of Bharat Ratna C. Subramaniam Fellowship 2004-05 here today. "While journalism attains greatness or notoriety on the basis of how relevant it is to the great occurrences of that time, today it is [the] mass media, on [the] one hand, and mass reality, on the other," he said.

Contrasting the reportage of certain events, Mr. Sainath said: "A young aspiring actress Nafisa Joseph committed suicide. While it was very sad that a young life was snuffed out in one stroke, for the next 12 hours the incident got more television coverage than the death of 30,000 farmers received over the past 10 years. The suicide invaded every possible arena of television, but compared to that did the suicide by farmers get the kind of exposure that it needed," he asked.

Similarly, while more than 400 reporters were accredited for the Lakme India Fashion Week 2004, barely six correspondents of the national dailies were deputed at the "height of the agrarian crisis," he said.

The important "processes" of current times included alarming levels of inequality, the gigantic agrarian crisis and the privatisation of resources, in particular the privatisation of water.

"In a country like India, privatisation of water is like privatising rainfall. India is a country that is largely dependent on rain-fed farming. And yet, we are promoting this," he said.

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