Rural Education- Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229

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Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India

 

Rural Education- Mahatma Gandhi  

 

Kakasaheb wishes to serve a number of purposes through this supplement. One of these is that persons who have passed what is ordinarily regarded as the school age, who are householders, are engaged in a profession or otherwise and are employed…the men and women living in about ten thousand villages of Maha Gujarat…should receive some kind of education which it is possible to give them. The term education in this sense should be interpreted in a wider sense. It is something distinct from knowledge of the alphabet. Villagers today have no practical knowledge in many fields and we find, instead, that often ignorant superstition has established a hold over them. Through this supplement, Kakasaheb intends to rid them of these superstitions and give them some useful knowledge. From the standpoint of health, the condition of villages is deplorable.

One of the chief causes of our poverty is the no availability of this essential knowledge of hygiene. If sanitation in villages can be improved, lakhs of rupees will easily be saved and the condition of people improved to that extent. A sick peasant can never work as hard as a healthy one. Not a little harm is being done because we have a higher death-rate than the average. It is held that our economically backward condition is responsible for our deplorable insanitation and that if the former is bettered, the latter will improve automatically. Let this be said in order to malign the Government or to put all the blame on it, but there is not even fifty percent truth in that statement. In my opinion based on experience, our poverty plays a very small part in our insanitary condition. I know what part it plays and where, but I do not wish to go into it here. The purpose of this series of articles is to point out the ways and means of eradicating those diseases for the incidence of which we are responsible and which can be readily eradicated at little or no expense. Let us examine the state of our villages from this standpoint. Many of these are found to be like heaps of garbage. People urinate and defecate at all places in the villages, not excluding even their own courtyards. Where this is done, no one takes care to cover up the faeces. The village roads are never well maintained and one finds heaps of dust everywhere.

We ourselves and our bullocks find it difficult even to walk on them. If there is a pond, people wash their utensils in it, cattle drink, bathe and wallow in it; children and even adults clean themselves in it after evacuation; they even defecate on the ground near it. This same water is used for drinking and cooking purposes. No rules are observed while building houses. Neither the convenience of neighbours, nor residents’ facilities for light and air are considered when buildings are put up. Because of a lack of co-operation among villagers, they do not even grow things which are essential to ensure their own hygienic conditions. Villagers do not put their leisure hours to good use, or perhaps they do not know how to do so, as a result of which their physical and mental capacity is depleted. For want of general knowledge of hygiene, when there is an incidence of a disease, instead of employing some home remedies very often the villagers seek the help of magicians or get involved in the web of mantras and spend money and in return the disease is merely aggravated. In this series, we shall examine all these reasons and see what can be done in the matter. 

 

Reference:

Shikshan ane Sahitya, 18-8-1929