Understanding migration

When governments and their plans are found to be blatantly wanting in addressing reverse migration, exercises such as the Ekta Parishad’s survey of migrant workers throughout India can be useful to work out creative long-lasting solutions.

- DIVYA TRIVEDI AND VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN

“For me, India begins and ends in its villages.”

—Mahatma Gandhi.

“... the old Indian social structure which has so powerfully influenced our people... was based on three concepts: the autonomous village community, caste and the joint family system.”

—Jawaharlal Nehru.

“The Hindu village is the working plant of the Hindu social order. One can see there the Hindu social order in operation in full swing.”

—Bhimrao Ambedkar.

THE THREE TOWERING LEADERS OF THE freedom movement differed in their ideas of the village and, by extension, about what constituted progress. “While for Gandhi the village was a site of authenticity, for Nehru it was a site of backwardness and for Ambedkar the village was the site of oppression,” wrote Surinder S. Jodhka in his 2002 article “Nation and Village” in Economic and Political Weekly. Of the three, only Ambedkar had some first-hand experience of village life during his childhood. But all of them essentially belonged to towns, had been to foreign lands for study or work and had families that were mobile. They also agreed that the status quo of the village needed to change for India to have any semblance of progress.