Naresh Fernandes pays tribute to P. Sainath for reminding us that India is still a poor country. Even as a young journo, a valuable lesson that he picked up from Sainath, Naresh writes, was “that poverty needed to be reported as a process, not as a series of glaring events, such as starvation deaths, or famine.” Naresh also cites in detail the following story:

…from Naupada in Orissa, in which Sainath tells of Mangal Sunani’s delight when the government gifted him a cow as part of a poverty-reduction scheme. Officials told Sunani that he and scores of others in the district (who were also given cows) would prosper after their animals were impregnated with the
semen of a Jersey bull, thereby producing high-yield cows and other bulls.

The officials even gave Sunani an acre of land for free, so that he could grow fodder for the cattle, and offered to pay him the minimum daily wage to work the plot. To ensure that the cows didn’t accidentally mate with a local bull, all the male cattle in the region were castrated.

Two years later, the community only had eight crossbred calves; many other calves had died shortly after they were born because the crossbred cows were susceptible to disease. By then, the local, hardier species of cattle had been wiped out because of the castration drive and the cow herders were forced to buy milk from the market. When they attempted to grow vegetables on the patches of land they’d been given, officials were annoyed: they wouldn’t be paid their wage if they raised anything but fodder, the villagers were warned. Sainath dryly headlined the piece, “Very few specimens—but a lot of bull.”

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