'India of my dreams is a self sufficient village economy'. Evaluate the significance of Gandhian thought in the present day India based on this statement.
Answers
Explanation:
At the time while India started formulating planning strategies in 1951-52 there was debate on India’s development problems. The debate centered around the Gandhian approach and the Nehruvian approach. Nehru adopted modernizing approach of the planning i.e. socialist framework of economic policy. He also viewed planning as a way of avoiding the unnecessary rigorous industrial transition. He believed that this way would affect the people living in the rural areas. He also learned lesson from Gandhi and accordingly initiated policy which centered around the rural masses.Gandhian approach has always said about the voluntary wants, the need for self-sufficient village communities and the issues relating to better balance between man and nature. Gandhi wanted to have an ideal society of his own imagination and his economic ideas are a part and parcel of his philosophical and sociological ideas. He was interested in the growth of human beings and more significantly the growth of the deprived and underprivileged group of people. He was, in fact, the supporter of the maximization of social welfare and he had a belief that the growth of an economy is relied on the development of the totality of human personality. According to him, an increase in personal income is an indication of the growth of national income. But the opposite may not be true.
Gandhi holds the view of the maximization of social welfare and for this he gives prime importance to the welfare of the individuals by reducing inequalities in income and wealth. According to Gandhi every person should be provided with bare minimum necessaries i.e. food, shelter, and clothing. Concentration of wealth to a few groups of people certainly will shatter the dream of a society which will be socialist in nature. Gandhi is in favour of the self-sufficient village economy where the villages will be the independent economic units. In agriculture that techniques will be adopted, which will not deplete the soil and pollute the environment. For this farmers should use eco-friendly production technique by using lesser and lesser amount of fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides. He prefers well irrigation instead of large hydro-electric projects since this will lead to exploitation. As regards the ownership of land holding, Gandhi is against the zamindari system and ownership of land should go to the actual tillers of the soil. He also viewed that there should be communal ownership of land for balanced cultivation and the surplus land, if any must be distributed to the rest of the village communities. India lives in villages. Naturally the development of the country depends on the development of villages. All the goods and services necessary for the village members should be grown within the village.In a word, every village should be a self-contained republic. If every village distributes its surplus produce to the poor villagers then there will not be the problem of poverty and starvation in the rural areas. Only this can help eradicating poverty and thus people can be happy and self-reliant. Agricultural sector alone cannot solve the problem of rural poverty and unemployment. That’s why Gandhi gives stress on the growth of the rural industries like khadi, handlooms, sericulture and handicrafts. He opines that large-scale industries make people lazy and help concentration of wealth in the hands of few. On the contrary, rural industries are based on family labour and required less amount of capital. Raw materials are also collected from local markets and the goods thus produced are sold in the local markets. Therefore there is no problem of production and market.Rural areas are without big industries. Concentration of these industries in few cities has led to a number of problems. The major problem is the problem of overpopulation in the industrialized areas. With this there arises pollution in the air and water. In addition, large-scale industries promoted monopolistic trends and unequal distribution of income. Rural industries, on the other hand, help decentralization of economic activities and a large proportion of income generated in these industries gets distributed among the workers and among a very large number of people. Gandhi is not in favour of large-scale industries in the sense that these industries are not related to a vast population living in rural areas. Thus industrialization, according to Gandhi, does not help the growth of the personality; contrarily it helps only the material progress of a few. Our handicrafts were destroyed by the use of machinery by the English rulers. Machinery, being capital-intensive, displace labour and naturally augments employment and under-employment.