RURAL DEVELOPMENT

India is the land of villages. So India's prosperity and happiness depend upon the prosperity and happiness of its villages.

After independence Indian villages have made some progress. However, a lot more needs to be done for rural development. Villages are still backward and neglected. There is almost total illiteracy, acute poverty, widespread unemployment, scarcity of essential things, lack of basic amenities and absence of public sanitation in almost all villages.

It will require combined efforts of the government, village people and the students to improve the condition of villages. The villagers can provide the necessary men and materials, the government the necessary financial and legal support and the students the necessary leadership and brain work.

The first task is to provide sufficient cultivable land to the farmers. The government should pass and enforce legislation to take away excess land from those who have more land and distribute it among the landless farmers and farmers having insufficient land. The government should start cottage industries and handicrafts connected with agriculture to provide employment to those who do not have land.

Government should also construct a school, a health-centre, a post office, and a panchayat office in every village.

The students should visit the near by villages and teach the villagers how to read and write, the habits of cleanliness and useful arts and crafts. They should persuade people to give up bad habits like smoking and drinking and bad customs like wasteful expenditure, infant marriages,untouchability and unequal matches.

The students should help them in forming a panchayat which would then take up the work of providing basic amenities like water and electricity, and public sanitation like public drainage system, public toilets, etc.

Students should persuade the villagers to form a co-operative society which would provide them loans, buy good seeds, manure and implements and tools and distribute them among the members and make arrangements to sell the farmers' produces at satisfactory prices. This will improve the economic condition of the farmers.

Thus the face of the Indian villages will change with the comprehensive measures of village development covering all aspects of the village life, viz., social, economic and political.