Bhoodan Movement | Indian History | Free PDF Download

BHOODAN

• The Bhoodan-Gramdan movement initiated inspired by Vinoba brought Vinoba to the international scene.
• The Bhoodan Movement or Land Gift Movement, was a voluntary land reform movement in India, started by Acharya Vinoba Bhave in 1951 at Pochampally village in Telangana.

 BACKGROUND

• Vinoba Bhave, a humble spiritual leader, the first nonviolent resister to the Britishers and reformer of Independent India started this.
• The mission was to persuade wealthy landowners to willingly give a small share of their land to the landless people.
• He travelled across all of India to convince the wealthy land-owners or land-lords to share a small area of their land with their poor and downtrodden neighbours with the condition that they can’t sell the land. Over a span of 20 years, a total of 4 million acres of land was shared across the country through this movement.

OBJECTIVES

1. To bring about a social order based on equality of opportunities by ensuring balanced economic distribution.
2. Decentralisation of economic holdings and powers. Vinobaji writes, while describing the objectives of Bhoodan movement, “In fact, objective is of three fold.”

• Firstly, power should be decentralised from village to village.
• Secondly, everybody should have a right on land and property.
• Thirdly, there should be no distribution in the matter of wages etc.
• Vinobaji was interested in the creation of a new social order.

OUTCOMES

• Assuming that there were 50 million landless peasants in India. Vinobaji set himself the task of collecting in land gifts of 50 million acres, so that one acre could be given to each landless peasant with an average of five members. Each such family, it was hoped, would end up with 5 acres.
• He travelled thousands of miles by foot accepting donations of land for redistribution to the landless. By 1969, the Bhoodan had collected over 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of land for redistribution.

ADVANTAGES

1. It is a bold step towards solving the problems of landless labourers in very peaceful manner.
2. It helps in bringing more land under plough. Even uncultivable land is cultivated.
3. It helps in the direction of tax burden.
4. It helps in reducing exploitation of the poor cultivators by the rich zamindars.

DISADVANTAGES

• The fundamental weakness of Bhoodan movement was that its appeal was directed not to the poor and landless, but to the rich and landlords.
• So the voluntary donations of lands were not the generous offerings of the rich. In many States the landlords donated lands to escape from the ceiling laws. They have “no free will”.
• Another weakness is that the depressed people and the exploited section of the society have already exhausted patience. They are in no mood to indefinitely wait for the positive results of the movement.

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