Page 102 - Acharya Vinoba Bhave in 21st Century ISBN

21oha “krkCnh esa vkpk;Z fouksck Hkkos dh izklafxdrk

And so it continued throughout the first part of 1952. Vinoba would pointedly refuse money gifts and
encourage institutions to rely on their own resources rather than donations of money. This came to end

only in October 1952 with sampattidân—Vinoba’s ingenious solution to accepting money without
actually having to touch it or be responsible for it.

III. Consequences and legacy

The Paunar experiment in self-reliance with kânchan-mukti and rishi-kheti did not fail; it was
abandoned in favor of bhoodan and what seemed a more promising way of guiding the world to

greater equality and non-violence. We have no way of knowing how the experiment might have
developed had Vinoba stayed with it. What we can do, however, is look how the three-year experiment

affected the world around it and left traces in the years and decades that follow.
Eventually, the bhoodan-gramdan movement completely eclipsed kânchan-mukti, first with

the development of sampattidân and later with the huge influx of money from governments and the
Gandhi Smarak Nidhi to hire workers and carry on the movement.

Still, if one looks, Vinoba never lost his aversion to money, the impulse behind kânchan-mukti.
One can see it later in many places in the Sarvodaya movement. One example is the Palni decision of

November 1956 (following another illness of Vinoba) when the Sarvodaya movement disbanded its
existing bhoodan organizations and renounced Gandhi Smarak Nidhi aid in order to purify and revitalize

itself. Another example is the sarvodaya pâtra, a household pot in which to collect handfuls of grain
(i.e., real produce, not money) as contributions to support Sarvodaya work. The whole gramdan

framework, although it did involve a grâm-kosh (village fund), was intended to minimize the need for
money and for interaction with the world beyond the village.

As late as April 1963, Vinoba still held out the vision of a kânchan-mukt society—it will be the
result, he says, of people increasing their appreciation of work and love. Once work ensures there is

enough, love will see to it that it is shared. Society can be like a joint family. People will then not pay
attention to money and there will be a kânchan-mukt society.

The transformation of rishi kheti

Unlike Kânchan-mukti, the term rishi-kheti still has some popular currency. But it has been
transformed well beyond the original idea of farming by hand. Today it has become an alternative for

“natural farming” and seems more likely to be identified with Masanobu Fukuoka than Vinoba.
Fukuoka is famous for the no-till and organic techniques he developed over decades of

18
agricultural experience and experimentation in Japan. In a recent technical article on Indian agriculture ,

102