Impact of Gandhiji's views on today's youth 1 min speech topic
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If India’s tallest and most influential leader propounded a view with great passion and conviction, its impact on generations of decision-makers that followed was bound to be profound. This was more than true in regard to cities. Gandhi’s views about cities were critical in the extreme and his appreciation of villages was laudatory to the hilt. They left indelible imprints on his followers and India’s decision-makers for decades. While several other factors have intervened and ought to share the culpability in landing cities in their current pitiable state, much of the neglect that they have faced could be traced to the urban views and expressions of the Mahatma.Gandhi, during his life, remained an unalloyed votary of the village. He firmly believed that the “future of India lies in its villages.” Reiterating his views, he wrote in the Harijan in 1947 that the “real India lives in the 7,00,000 villages. If Indian civilisation is to make its full contribution to the building up of a stable world order, it is this vast mass of humanity that has … to be made to live again.” He wished the country would emerge as a nation of villages and that each village would be a republic that was self-sufficient, empowered and proficient in managing its own affairs. “The cities are capable of taking care of themselves. It is the villages we have to turn to,” he wrote.
He was deeply anguished by the emergence of the cities as exploiters of villages. He also saw cities in civilisational terms as alien to the soil of India and their growth as signs of degeneration. He wrote, “To me, the rise of cities like Calcutta and Bombay is a matter of sorrow rather than congratulation. India has lost in having broken up a part of her village system.” Perhaps, his strongest condemnation of cities was captured in his following words, “I regard the growth of cities as an evil thing, unfortunate for mankind and the world, unfortunate for England and certainly unfortunate for India. The British have exploited India through its cities. The latter have exploited the villages. The blood of the villages is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built.” Statements and writings that reflected similar sentiments continued to flow from Gandhi over several decades, and with the exception of Dr. Ambedkar, generally went uncontested by other leaders of the time.
Pandit Nehru, who was at the helm of the country for 17 long years, saw villages in a different light and was aware of the frailties of rural India, especially the entrenched caste system, and was quite critical of the traditional social order. In his Discovery of India, he unequivocally propounded this. He wrote, “In the context of society today, the caste system and much that goes with it are wholly incompatible, reactionary, restrictive, and barriers to progress. There can be no equality in status and opportunity within its framework, nor can there be political democracy, and much less economic democracy
Despite the fact that Nehru’s overall analysis of the village differed from Gandhi, he was clear that developmental priorities should focus on the village. He was not against urbanisation per . He backed the development of the new city of Chandigarh and regarded it as symbolic of the freedom of India and an expression of the nation’s faith in the future. However, he completely concurred with his Guru that cities did not deserve care Cities after all are moving and they will go ahead. But the villages require great attention,” he said, while speaking at a seminar on social welfare in September 1963. He drove his point of developmental preferences further Although I live in Delhi city my mind is concerned more and more with the villages of India and how to give them the basic necessities of life, and how to make them self-reliant Speaking at the Central Council of Local Self-Government in 1963 he remarked Municipalities by and large, are not shining examples of efficiency in doing any kind of good work. A very dangerous situation confronts us now when we have also the Panchayati Raj and new councils and Parishads have been elected. Are they also going down the drain like our third-rate municipalities There is no reason to contest his assessment of the state of municipal bodies, as they then existed. The question is, what did he do about them? Clearly not much. The net result of Nehru’s thinking was that it further cemented the anti-urban mindset that Gandhian thought had imposed on the political masters of the country.
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