the agenda that Sainath is pushing is to create the impression that people who have benefitted from economic reforms have done so at the expense of people who haven’t. If you read his editorials and columns regularly, you find this agenda is quite consistent. It’s also a false impression – because the prosperity that has arisen from reform never existed earlier, and the destitute never had any wealth to be snatched away.

The denominator does not make it less inhumane, but very definitely makes it less important. Dying in childbirth does not exist in a vaccuum. The frequency of how often they die will determine whether it is more important to gear our health system to preventing maternal mortality, to tackling AIDS, or to build sanitation systems. When you exaggerate the extent of maternal deaths you deflect attention away from potentially more serious problems – rural roads, law and order, or drinking water supply, say. In such a case, calling it a scare tactic is quite justified.

Saying that we should do more is perhaps hackneyed, but you will notice that Sainath does not offer any solutions about what we should do. Also, the question of whether society cares enough or not is moot. Suppose society did care. What action would it take to show it cares? Tackling maternal mortality will require systemic solutions including the construction of hospitals and primary health centres, training doctors and midwives, ensuring that these medical personnel are at their places of work, and work without demanding bribes. No matter how much any one individual might care about this issue, she doesn’t have the resources to set this giant system into place all over India.

Blaming society for not caring – and that too without proof – is a lazy copout from addressing the problems of systemic failure and proposing solutions, which is something Sainath has rarely bothered to do.

One metric I would like to see where I would like India compared with countries like for instance a Korea at one end or a Nigeria at the other would be the inverse of a co-efficient of variation in these healthcare statistics. Simply divide the averages by the Standard deviation. I would probably stick my neck out and say India would be apthetic in this regard.

Also for instance if Nigeria’s per capita income is say $X, I would probably re compute the per capita from the bottom up for India’s population till it reaches the same $X. Then we would compare the Health statistic referred to by Sainath for the new sample of the Indian population which has a per capita income $X. Maybe then we will be closer to the hypothesis Sainath makes.

We must remember he writes with passion, sometimes factual slip ups are better forgiven unless the facts paint a totally different picture.

Isn’t it that maybe, just maybe, instead of focusing so much on the rapid growth of India, we could pause for a moment and give a brief thought on the television channels to if we can speed up our ranking on the Global Hunger Index from 94 up a few ranks.

Or maybe its just not that important. Sorry for mentioning it.

Sainath suffers from typical singleissueadvocatitis. You begin to believe that the issue is so important that you do everything to try and put it on top of the public agenda. That’s the most charitable explanation I can offer.

But even if we are charitable to him, the morality of offering misleading data, knowingly or out of ignorance, is dubious. Playing up the wrong problem comes at the cost of relatively playing down other problems.

There was a time when Sainath could be taken seriously because he had his feet on the ground. No more. He’s turning gaps into antagonisms, which is not at all a good way to bridge them.

This idiot won the Magsasay award. What to say.

At least at this point, I feel a hesitation from attributing a bias to Sainath. As they say, when you are too close to something you cannnot see things clearly. Probably Sainath has seen so much negative news out there in rural India (and undoubtedly there is a lot of that), he has lost all hope to see anything which is not a devastating news.