Gandhi’s beliefs save dying village
From
MARY LEAN,
in Ralegaon
Shindi, India
The village of Ralegaon Shindi in the heart of Maharashtra, India, has come back from the dead.
Ten years ago it was dying of thirst, like 7000 other Maharashtran villages with soil too dry to feed their populations. Its people were talking of abandoning it and trying their luck in Bombay, where thousands of refugees from drought already sleep on the pavements every night. Today, there has been a remarkable transformation. The village is a green island in the parched countryside. Whereas a fifth of its inhabitants went hungry in the mid-19705, and even the more affluent were barely scraping subsistence level, now everyone has enough to eat. Villagers come from miles around to see what has happened. They gather in the temple to hear the story, as sparrows dart in and out, tugging at the brightly coloured paper decorations and swinging on the bells. The village's recovery began when 25 bullets hit anlndian army during the
war. All its passengers were killed or maimed except for the 23-year-old driver, who came from Ralegaon Shindi. “Anna” (“Brother”) Hazare, as he is now universally called, tells his visitors that he felt God had saved him to serve his community. He adopted rigorous Gandhian disciplines, swearing himself to a life of celibacy and self-denial. He stayed on with the army long enough to earn his pension and then in 1975, aged 33, he returned to the village and set to work.
His first target was to raise morale. He staged a seven-day religious recitation marathon in the temple and began an assault on the village’s drink problem. Bootlegging and moneylending were Ralegaon Shindi’s only thriving professions at the time. There were 40 illegal distilleries in a village of 2000 and frequent drunken disputes and crimes.
Hazare persuaded offenders to take a pledge in the temple and the stills closed down. Later, the villagers bought uo the shops’ cigarette stocks and Burnt them. “Addic-
tion was the cause of our troubles,” maintains Hazare. He turned his attention next to the water problem. Drought-prone villages like Ralegaon Shindi depend on erratic seasonal rains to water their crops. Some receive as little as 250 mm of rain a year. Their problem is how to store the rain, which falls during the monsoons, rather than letting it run away in seasonal rivers and streams. This is not just a question of wells and irrigation, but also of the soil’s capacity to retain moisture. Experts place over-reliance on chemical fertilisers and on waterguzzling cash-crops like sugarcane alongside deforestation as major threats to soil humidity.
Ralegaon Shindi is tackling the problem from both angles. The villagers began by digging wells along the course of the river, which is dry for most of£fhe year. The
wells are fed by a percolation tank further upstream and pumps lift the water from the wells to the fields. They have planted thousands of trees to hold the water in the soil, including the versatile subabul, which provides green manure, fodder, firewood, and timber. They grow a variety of crops; and they use large quantities of organic manure which is both cheaper than chemical fertilisers and more conducive to soil humidity. The organic manure comes from the village’s 28 biogas plants. These produce methane gas from animal dung and vegetable wastes — and the accompanying slurry is spread on the fields. The gas is piped into the homes. There is a health spinoff, too. Ralegaon Shindi now has communal latrines to feed its biogas plants. Following Gandhian principles, the villagers have given their labour free to build the tillage schools. Each child plants e tree
when he starts nursery school and is responsible for it from then onwards. The community has also built homes for nine landless Harijan families — the former “untouchables” of the Hindu caste system, still condemned to hovels in most villages. Another group of Harijans owned land but were so heavily in debt that they could not afford to cultivate it. The community took it over, planted it with onions and subabul, gave the proceeds to the Harijans to repay their debts, and then returned the land to them to farm themselves. Hazare’s development model has a spiritual and moral bias. “It is the nearest approach I have seen to the Gandhian ideal,” says R. U. Chandrachood, a former director of the Khadi and Cottage Industries Commission. The temple is the hub of the village, both as community centre, complete with TV, and as a source of inspiration. Villagers bring their disputes there to be settled and say that crime has ceased. . They dedicate new wells and '
buildings to Hindu saints and are woken by loudspeakers at 5 a.m. every morning for religious exhortation and devotions. Hazare himself lives in the temple and eats with the schoolchildren, although his parents and family still live in the village. Most of the funds come from Government subsidies and bank loans, which are speedily repaid; but the villagers have had to pay their share. The villagers cut one crippling social expense by opting for mass weddings — ten or more couples, regardless of caste, sharing the ceremonies and the feasts. The villagers leave all communal money matters to Hazare, secure in the knowledge that his personal account never contains more than his army pension of ?40. A tenth of the world’s population live in India’s villages. Hazare sees Ralegaon Shindi as a model. “If we are successful, this can be repeated elsewhere,” he says. He has a file of letters describing what visitors have been inspired to do in their own villages. Copyright — London Observer."
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Bibliographic details
Press, 2 July 1985, Page 21
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942Gandhi’s beliefs save dying village Press, 2 July 1985, Page 21
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