By Desibuzz Staff

World renowned Indian journalist P. Sainath will deliver this year’s Dr. Sharma Memorial Lecture at the Surrey Public Library (City Centre Branch) on Saturday, October 5, 2024. The lecture was instituted by the Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation soon after Prof. Sharma’s death in 2010. Dr. Sharma was a professor at Simon Fraser University for over 30 years from 1968 to 1999 and was a community activist. He had left all of his estate to form and sustain the Foundation so that it would continue his legacy of activism.

What is the state of media in Modi’s India? How free is the Indian press? Does it help citizens make responsible, informed choices or does it act now as an ideological cheerleader of the state? What are the different ways of gagging free speech and dissent now in play in India?Sainath will discuss these and other questions in his lecture. There will also be a question-and-answer session after the lecture.

P. (Palagummi) Sainath is an award-winning writer, journalist, and activist based in Mumbai, India, who serves as founder and editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), an independent multimedia digital platform showcasing the stories of rural people and everyday life to bear on contemporary Indian politics. 

As an investigative reporter, teacher, and advocate for rural issues, Sainath has won over 70 national and international reporting awards and fellowships, including the Fukuoka Grand Prize (2021), World Media Summit award (2014), andAmnesty International’s Inaugural Global Human Rights Reporting Prize (2000), as well as theRamon Magsaysay Award (2007), Asia’s most prestigious prize, often referred to as the ‘AsianNobel.’

Demonstrating an expansive range on politics, public archives, and storytelling, Sainath’s prize-winning book Everybody Loves a Good Drought (1996) – now in its 61st printing – exploring 1990s-era liberalization through rural lives and work, has remained a non-fiction bestseller by anIndian author for years and was declared a Penguin Classic in 2012. In recent years, he has published well over 150 investigative reports on India’s agrarian crisis in The Hindu newspaper, the largest journalistic body of work ever on India’s farming communities. His more recent book The LastHeroes Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom (Penguin Nov 2022) – on India’s last living freedom fighters is headed for its 6th edition and is already out in 8 languages including Punjabi.

Sainath has taught journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai for 37 years and has held visiting appointments at various institutions including UC Berkeley and Princeton University. He has also been, this July, appointed the A. D. White Professor-at-large for Cornell University.

The lecture on October 5, 2024 is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities (Simon Fraser University) and the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD).

For more information about the lecture, contact Zahid Makhdoom at: zmakhdoom@gmail.com or AbiSharma at abisharma@yahoo.com.