With the People

In 1965, war with Pakistan was fought and won. Our Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked the nation to forego one time meal to avert the food calamity facing the country because of the sudden change in foreign aid. I mused, why not fight this battle on food front at every doorsteps. I wrote about this to my close friend, Mukund Kirloskar, the editor of well known 'Kirloskar' magazine with top circulation.

He phoned me and asked me to be in his editor's chair and in January 1966 Kirloskar issue, a fully illustrated 24 page special supplement titled 'Ladha Ladhavoo Ha Ghara Gharatun' ( Let us fight the battle on food front at our every door step) appeared. It described several of my small garden results and approaches. This supplement created a tremendous response and in a short time more than ten thousand letters began to pour in. To channelise this enthusiasm, a new concept of 'Swashray Vikas Mandal', meaning self help, self reliance for building creative constructive possibilities in one's limited resources, was put forth in October 1966 issue and later a second supplement 'Perte Vha Perte Vha' (Start Sowing, Start Sowing) also appeared.

These ten thousand letters were all responded and at the end nearly 500 joined out of which 50 are with me even today and five of them, the new visionaries became and have remained with me as very close family members since then.

This response and statistics helped me to analyze the reasons why it happened that way and soon I realized the presentation of results in my article was not fitting to the real life situations of the participants who had written me to learn by 'course study' or as a 'package' and not with a desire to share the process of best of scientific knowledge assimilation and testing.

This tremendous mass effect made me understand vividly for the first time that no successful work or activity can bring any within change if one tries to put it as an activity 'for' the people, 'by' the people or even as 'of' the people. To make these activities infectious, it should be of the nature of 'with' the people. We will come across this process in our success story of Scientific Grape Revolution in Maharashtra. All these experiments however made me vividly understand various fallacies (hidden curriculums) in our education and extension systems. It also made me wise to understand why most of the Government and Non-Government development plans failed though they were fully aided and were meticulously prepared by the experts.