Equal-L: "Towards Journalism of Conscience: The Media and the Challenge of Rural

"Towards Journalism of Conscience: The Media and the Challenge of Rural
Poverty".

The lecture will be given by Palagummi Sainath, Rural Affairs editor of
The Hindu newspaper at the Swift Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity
College Dublin on Wednesday 28th November at 7pm. The lecture is
co-hosted by the IIIS, Dept of Anthropology at NUI Maynooth and
Connect-World.

The lecture is open to the public so all are welcome to attend.

Please find additional information on Palagummi Sainath below. Please
contact Sharon Jackson if you require further information on the event.

Queries:
Sharon Jackson
sharon.jackson@tcd.ie
Tel: +353 1 896 3668
Fax: +353 1 896 3939

www.tcd.ie/iiis
Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS) The Sutherland
Centre Sixth Floor, Arts Building Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland


Biography of Palagummi Sainath:

Palagummi Sainath has worked as a journalist reporting on development
and related issues in India for 26 years. He has won over 30 national
and international
journalism awards and fellowships, his most recent being the Ramon
Magsaysay award in 2007 for journalism, literature, and creative
communications arts. He has also won Amnesty International's Global
Human Rights Journalism prize (2000) and (with CNN's Jim Clancy) the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Boerma prize
for work of 'international importance in addressing the issues of
hunger.' In November 2002, he became the first print media journalist to
win the 'Inspiration Award' at the Global Visions Film Festival in
Edmonton, Canada (with film maker Joe Moulins). The first working
journalist to win India's Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, Sainath is also a
winner of the BD Goenka prize for Excellence in Journalism, and has also
been an Eisenhower Fellow.

Sainath's book, 'Everybody Loves a Good Drought' (1996), has gone into
19 printings and has been translated into a number of languages. In the
last decade, he has spent on average three quarters of the year with
village people, reporting extensively on agrarian crises due to
neo-liberal policies, on the lack of sensitivity and efficiency by the
government and the bureaucracy, on farmer suicides in Maharashtra,
Andhra Pradesh and Kerala and also reported on the plight of the dalits.

Sainath's strength lies in his energy as an investigator, the rigour of
his research and the lucidity of his prose. A fine photographer and
public speaker, he is currently the Rural Affairs Editor of India's most
serious English language daily, The Hindu, of Chennai. The eminent
Indian journalist Nikhil Chakravartty once described Sainath's work as
"the conscience of the Indian nation." His work on poverty, hunger and
inequality has also won praise from the likes of Nobel Laureate Amartya
Sen who once described him as one of the world's great experts on hunger
and famine.

Sainath is actively involved in the training of journalists in the
poorest regions of India's countryside. He has also been teaching
journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai for 20 years. Many of
Sainath's students have themselves gone on to win major national awards.

Source: Equal-L