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Vast Reservoir of Technical Skills in Rural India

February 4, 2002

  • The urban migration of today is because the rural population finds urban living attractive, exciting and enjoyable.
  • As anything else, this too can be done either way.
  • It happens today partly positive and partly negative but with the negative spearheading.
  • The rural side is emotional and subtle; in India in addition it is spiritually subtle.
  • Towns carry the fragrance of social pre-eminence and a ready opening to political leadership both buttressed by modernity.
  • Positive urban migration is to leave the village having exhausted her personality potential for one. Negatively it is movement of frustration, social neglect, hope of success for one in a tough social atmosphere having failed in a conducive one.
  • Confining the inquiry to the Indian context, we will exclude the subtle vital civilisation as well as occult ones as to how they figure here.
  • Social movements are life movements. They move as water flows down a gradient, not where it can be used. The great rivers of the world were created thus.
  • One simple rule that is basic and essential is when a government sponsors a scheme it needs a machinery and capital. When society accepts a scheme, the administrative apparatus is an encumbrance and money is a disincentive.
  • The idea presented here is the rural side has in abundance the skills of carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths and the extraordinary common sense of the farmer who invariably accomplishes. This common sense, being superior to these skills, can acquire any skill of that level endlessly.
  • No boy wants to be a carpenter like his father in the village thus condemning him to backwardness. But any son of a carpenter after S.S.L.C or B.A. loves to be a modern carpenter with modern tools and earn a modern wage aspiring to become an entrepreneur of a carpentry workshop.
  • All modern vocations in India are outdated now in the West. But to follow that is progress and prosperity for rural India.
  • The vocational training on the computer, the courses of literacy on the computer together can galvanize the rural parts.
  • Rajaji conceived of the entire village as a natural, traditional polytechnic.
  • Surely he had the genius to see the abundant spiritual potentials of talents and capacities in rural India from where national prosperity can emerge. It is an intuition of life.
  • To see that potential in a modern context as an outlet for

- Inner subtle potentials for prosperity.

- Linking it with the emerging urban life.

- Employing the computer for literacy of life will transform life.

  • Once an energetic start is made, the rest can be imaginatively fashioned. Left to itself it may misshape the fresh energies which itself will be progress over the present.
  • When Rajaji introduced this scheme, E.V.R branded it as a vicious scheme to perpetuate the caste system which raised a furore inside Congress leading to his stepping down from power.
  • In my view if an act is initiated its completion is determined by the honesty of the motive behind. Also the extent of detachment to the act enables its completion. Rajaji declared excessive attachment to it.
  • The physical refuses to give up what it possesses.
  • In this scheme is embedded the greater idea of blending the Brahman in Matter discovered in the West and perfected organisationally in USA without the cultural over burden and the light of Spirit buried in Indian bodies, carefully preserved by vital darkness, organised into spineless, shameless falsehood.
  • Sri Aurobindo says that the idea of the Infinite emerging from the finite explains the mathematical accuracy found in Nature, her innovation, adapting means to ends, the skill in experimentation.
  • The earth or at least humankind will be introduced to the realm of the Brahman in Matter discovering the Light of the Spirit buried in human bodies.
  • As the Indian needs to discover the practical organisation and their organisational values of punctuality, etc., the American must develop the patient curiosity of reaching the roots of light of his successful practical organisation and collecting them into a flame.
  • Michael Brecher's analysis of succession in India in 1964 and 1966 very ably collects all the objective fact that went into the Decision. It is empirical.
  • The act, the events that converged into that act, the energy of those trends, the motive that released that energy and the Being behind the will of the motives are ably traced. But he has no theory or framework.
  • The same thing can be traced from inside as Real-Idea, idea, thoughts, plans, etc. Both will meet. The one needs a few months elaborate research impossibly difficult which will end as a basket of facts and not necessarily in a vision, while the other can precisely give the vision. For one who has the training the result is instantaneous.
  • To approach the village programme from both sides will ensure the result.



story | by Dr. Radut