Everybody Loves a Good Drought

It is often hard to get our minds around poverty and the scarcity of resources that affect people’s lives. This is especially true of rural life in the Global South. This is a highly accessible book written by an eminent journalist in India and is considered to be a classic text on rural poverty. It also illuminates the failures of governance including the programs and policies that seek to help poor and marginalized communities in countries like India.

The bitter irony of this title reflects the writer’s passionate anger at the conditions he found in his reports for the Times of India between 1993 and 1995, during visits to some of India’s poorest villages. The power of the reportage is breathtaking, portraits of a division of labour most people even in India scarcely know exists - like the palm-tree climbers of Ramnad in Tamil Nadu, who extract juice from 40 trees a day in a 15-hour shift; and the village in Odisha whose people have been evicted three times for ‘development’ projects; but also of the women who… show more.