[1][2] He has extensively written on rural India, his notable interests are poverty, structural inequities, caste discrimination and farmers protests.

[5] He was a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and was earlier the Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu until his resignation in 2014.

[7] His book Everybody Loves a Good Drought is a collection of his field reports as a journalist, and focuses on different aspects of rural deprivation in India.

[11][12] On 1 June 2015, Sainath became the first ThoughtWorks Chair Professor in Rural India and Digital Knowledge at the Asian College of Journalism.

[13] He won the inaugural World Media Summit[14] Global Award for Excellence 2014 in Public Welfare for exemplary news professionals in developing countries.

[clarification needed] The paper ran 84 reports by Sainath across 18 months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his book Everybody Loves A Good Drought.

[23] His writing has provoked responses that include the revamping of the Drought Management Programs in the state of Tamil Nadu, development of a policy on indigenous medical systems in Malkangiri in Orissa, and revamping of the Area Development Program for tribal people in Madhya Pradesh state.

The Times of India institutionalized his methods of reporting,[clarification needed] and 60 other leading newspapers initiated columns on poverty and rural development.

In the single district of Anantapur, in Andhra Pradesh, between 1997 and 2000, more than 1800 people have committed suicides, but when the state assembly requested these statistics, only 54 were listed.

This fatal condition results from consuming Ciba-Geigy's pesticide, which the government distributes free, and is almost the only thing the rural poor can readily acquire!!

[25]Sainath, at an interaction program in Bangalore, revealed that the People's Archive of Rural India is going to commence operation on an experimental basis from June 2013.

On June 28, 2021, Sainath won the Fukuoka Grand Prize,[1] one of Japan’s most prestigious international awards that honours "individuals, groups or organisations who create as well as preserve the many distinct and diverse cultures of the Asian Region."

[citation needed] On July 7, 2021, the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh announced the winners of its new YSR Lifetime Achievement Awards.

[citation needed] Another documentary film, Nero's Guests,[44] looks at inequality (as manifest in India's agrarian crisis) through Sainath's reporting on the subject.