From VILLAGE SWARAJ, M.K. Gandhi

INDUSTRIALISM

Industrialism is, I am afraid, going to be a curse for mankind.  Industrialism depends entirely on your capacity to exploit, on foreign markets being open to you, and on the absence of competitors.  There is a growing body of enlightened opinion which distrusts this civilization which has insatiable material ambition at one end and consequent war at the other.

High thinking is inconsistent with complicated material life based on high speed imposed on us by Mammon worship. All the graces of life are possible only when we learn the art of living nobly.  India's destiny lies not along the bloody way of the West, of which she shows signs of tiredness, but along the bloodless way of peace that comes from a simple and godly life.

MACHINERY

I want the dumb millions of our land to be healthy and happy and I want them to grow spiritually. As yet for this purpose we do not need the machine.

CITIES AND VILLAGES

There are two schools of thought current in the world. One wants to divide the world into cities and the other into villages. The village civilization and the city civilization are totally different things. One depends on machinery and industrialization, and the other on handicrafts.  I regard the growth of cities as an evil thing, unfortunate for mankind and the world...

We are inheritors of a rural civilization. The vastness of our country, the vastness of the population, the situation and the climate of the country have in my opinion, destined it for a rural civilization.

VILLAGE SWARAJ I am convinced that if India is to attain true freedom and through India the world also, then sooner or later the fact must be recognized that people will have to live in villages, not in towns, in huts, not in palaces.  Crores of people will never be able to live at peace with each other in towns and palaces. They will then have no recourse but to resort to both violence and untruth.

My idea of Village Swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants  and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity. Thus every village's first concern will be to grow its own food crops and cotton for its cloth.

An ideal Indian village will be so constructed as to lend itself to perfect sanitation. It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilation built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles of it. The cottages will have courtyards enabling householders to plant vegetables for domestic use and to house their cattle. The village lanes and streets will be free from all avoidable dust. It will have wells according to its needs and accessible to all. It will have houses of worship for all, also a common meeting place, a village common for grazing its cattle, a co-operative dairy, primary and secondary schools in which industrial education will be the central fact, and it will have Pancayats for settling disputes. It will produce its own grains, vegetables and fruits, and its own Khadi. This is roughly my idea of a model village... I am convinced that the villagers can, under intelligent guidance, double the village income as distinguished from individual income. There are in our villages inexhaustible resources not for commercial purposes in every case but certainly for local purposes in almost every case.

THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD

In the future set-up we shall have only two things, the village and the world. We may have the names of countries on the map for the sake of convenience, but in reality, there will be no intermediary between the world and the village. All the authority concerning the material side of life will rest with the village. The village will have power to order its own life.

The power of moral advancement of the whole world will rest in the word centre. The districts or the States will only be the agents of the village community. Thus we shall have the village at the base and the World Authority at the Centre. Human society will be organized on the basis of small village communities of, say, 2 to 3 thousand souls each. There would be real fraternity and cooperation in the village community. There would be no private ownership. The village will be a model of corporate life. The world centre will be the ultimate coordinating link between these primary communities. [Bhoodan, 8-9-'62, VINOBA]