Exposing the inequalities behind tiger economies

India: Lorna Siggins , Western Correspondent, meets award-winning journalist Palagummi Sainath

India: Lorna Siggins, Western Correspondent, meets award-winning journalist Palagummi Sainath

Media organisations are supporting a system of global inequality that has "never been so cynically constructed or ruthlessly engineered", according to a leading Indian commentator.

An "entire architecture" of "Victorian economics" is ensuring that the rate of inequality is growing faster than ever before, Palagummi Sainath, rural affairs editor of The Hindu, says.

The award-winning journalist and photographer, who is due to speak in Trinity College Dublin tomorrow night, was in NUI Galway at the weekend for Irish Aid's third-level conference.

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Sainath says cuts in public services, the imposition of user charges, and the withdrawal of the state from areas of influence which hit the poor hardest, is a common experience - whether in Ireland or across the globe.

"At the same time, you have this incredible bravado reflected in the media about Asian tigers and Celtic tigers that at one level is rather pathetic - because the enrichment of a vary narrow elite at the expense of the majority is not sustainable," he says.

"India is the classic example of this, where we have a devastating agrarian crisis and yet all you hear about is how great our economy is doing."

Sainath's newspaper, which has a daily circulation of about 1.4 million, has just published a report on the suicides of some 150,000 farmers, most of whom had been growing cash crops in various regions.

Two-thirds of the deaths occurred in four major states, he says, and his research on contributory factors points to the impact of global market forces. EU subsidies to Irish and other European farmers are having a "devastating" effect on farmers in India and Africa, he says.

Even in developed countries, like the US, there is "remarkable growth" in inequality, he maintains.

"At the same time, media organisations are glorifying the market and the word of economists, and so the prevailing philosophy of market fundamentalism has become the mother of all fundamentalisms in recruiting similar belief systems," he said.

Sainath is careful to distinguish between the work of individual journalists and media organisations. "Media institutions have always been in the service of power, and are part of the power structure, but in the last 20 years there has been a collapse of all restraint on corporate power.

"We cannot let corporate power bypass sovereign power - as in elected governments - and we are going to have to decide if markets exist to service people or vice versa."

Even the threat posed by climate change could become a "business opportunity" for some, unless it is "faced up to in terms of the damage done, not just to the environment but to fellow human beings".

His lecture, Towards Journalism of Conscience: The Media and the Challenge of Rural Poverty, takes place tomorrow in Trinity at 7pm.