In 2008 P. Sainath was a  Nirupama Chatterjee Teaching Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for the fall semester.

Sainath is the rural affairs editor for The Hindu newspaper, and he has written extensively on farmer suicides and other issues affecting agriculture, as well as hunger and poverty in India. Sainath is also the author of the book “Everybody Loves a Good Drought,” which tells stories from the poorest districts of India.

He has received close to 40 other national and international journalism awards and fellowships in 30 years as a journalist, including the Amnesty International global award for human rights journalism in 2000, the PUCL Human Rights Journalism Award, and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in the category of Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts in 2007. In June 2006 Sainath won the Judges’ prize for the Harry Chapin Media Awards for his series in The Hindu about the ongoing agrarian crisis in Vidharbha and other areas.