The Australia India Institute presents the first Baba Amte Memorial Lecture.

Date: Tuesday 7 February 2012
Time: 5.30 - 6.30pm
A drinks reception will follow the lecture until 7.30pm.

For catering purposes, please RSVP by Monday 6 February 2012.

"Slumdogs versus Millionaires - Rural distress in the Age of Inequality"

About the speaker:

P. SAINATH, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia's most prestigious prize (and often referred to as the 'Asian Nobel'), for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts. He was given the award for his "passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's national consciousness." He was the first Indian to win the Magsaysay in that category in nearly 25 years. He was also the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism Prize in its inaugural year in 2000.

His other awards include: the United Nation's Food & Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) Boerma Prize (the foremost award for development journalism) in 2000; the Harry Chapin Media Award in New York, 2006; and was the first and only print media journalist until now to win the Inspiration Award at the Global Visions Film Festival in Edmonton, Canada in 2002. He was also the first Indian reporter to win the European Commission's Lorenzo Natali Prize for journalism in 1995. Sainath's book Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin India, 1996) has remained a non-fiction bestseller by an Indian author for years. Working on this book involved covering 100,000-km across India. Sainath used 16 forms of transport for this, and walked over 5,000 km on foot. It has been published in multiple editions and in several languages. The book is in its 31st printing and is presently being used in over 100 universities in India and overseas.