- Lived:
- b. 13 May 1957, Madras (Chennai) · a Telugu family; a working life spent on the roads of rural India, with a desk — when he uses one — in Bombay (Mumbai)
- Field:
- journalism — rural reporting, the agrarian crisis, and the building of the People's Archive of Rural India
- The Big Idea:
- The poorest Indians are not a statistic but people with names, and a journalist's job is to go where they live, stay long enough to understand, and count what the state prefers not to count.
- In their words:
- journalists should be "external auditors" to power — his stated reason for refusing government awards (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- When India's newspapers stopped covering the villages where most Indians live, one reporter spent a year and roughly a hundred thousand kilometres in the ten poorest districts, wrote the book that made the countryside impossible to ignore, and then built the archive that records it still.