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.
Sainath’s book is a collection of 84 articles he wrote for the Times of India between 1990 and 1992, during which he lived in some of the poorest villages in India, especially in Tamil Nadu, as well as regions that are now known as Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, all made possible by a two-year Bennett and Coleman fellowship. These articles delve into how various government projects operate—or don’t—on the ground, and whether they actually deliver on their promises. He brought these stories to life by detailing the projects alongside the experiences of the villagers, supported by thorough statistics.
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.
The book is considered one of the most detailed, authentic, highly regarded and readable studies of 1980s rural India.
To make rural stories more accessible, excerpts from the book have been also published on People’s Archive of Rural India.
