Unto the last
Small contributions from
over 1200 individuals residing in Mumbai have helped provide food, shelter,
clothing, health and education services to over 25,000 tribal families of South
Gujarat
Forty two years ago, two women and two men in their
early 30s got inspired by Bhoodan leader Vinoba Bhave and left their homes and
quit their jobs in Mumbai to work for the uplift of the poor adivasis in the
remote villages of Dharampur taluka in Valsad district of South Gujarat,
bordering Maharashtra.
The youngest of the four was a doctor, Navnit Faujdar,
who set up his clinic under a tamarind tree in Pindval, a remote village reachable
only after trudging 25 kilometers from Dharampur by foot through a hilly track
1700 feet above the sea level. His clinic comprised of a table, a chair and a
small physician’s bag from which he dispensed medicines to the local tribals
from out of the stock of physician’s samples he collected from his doctor
friends in Mumbai.
It was while undertaking a padayatra as part of the Bhoodan movement that Dr Faujdar and his
three fellow-travelers from Mumbai – Chandrakantaben, Harvilasben and Kantibhai
Shah saw the dire poverty of the people and decided to dedicate the rest of
their lives for the uplift of the adivasis of the region.
“Night blindness was rampant among the local people.
The death rate of children below five years was very high. There were also
incidents of starvation deaths. The root cause of all this was malnutrition,”
recalls Kantibhai Shah. “Though Dharampur is known as the Cherapunji of Gujarat
because it receives the highest rainfall of nearly 100 inches in a year, people
faced acute shortage of drinking water during the summer. This was because
there was system of collecting rainwater which quickly emptied into the sea,”
he explains.
What started as a free medical aid programme in 1968
with help from the medical fraternity in Mumbai, Valsad, Surat, Vadodara and
Ahmedabad, was expanded over the year to run programmes that generated
employment, improved agriculture, ensured food security during frequent spells
of drought and provided tiled roof on huts that did not get washed away in
torrential rains.
“To be able to undertake these development works, we
needed funds. So, we formed a public charitable trust in the name of Sarvodaya
Parivar Trust. Though not related to each other by blood, all four of us had
become one parivar (family),” says Harvilasben.
After they joined the Bhoodan movement, quitting their
job in Mumbai as school teachers, both Harvilasben and Kantaben had developed
and maintained personal contacts with hundreds of middle-class Gujarati
families in the metropolis by enrolling them as subscribers of ‘Bhoomiputra’,
the mouthpiece of the Sarvodaya movement.
Both wrote a column in the magazine under the name of
‘Harishchandra’, formed by combining their names. In this immensely popular
column, they wrote real-life human-interest stories highlighting the good deeds
of individuals. Kantibhai Shah, as editor of Bhoomiputra, gave detailed
accounts of the development work being carried out by the Sarvodaya Parivar and
other like-minded groups in Gujarat and elsewhere.
“While on a door-to-door campaign in Mumbai to collect
subscription fee for Bhoomiputra, we would narrate our experiences and ask for
monetary assistance for our work in Pindval. Soon, we could convince over 1,500
people in Mumbai to donate a certain part of their income for the welfare of
the tribals of Dharampur. Some of the donors would also visit us in Pindval and
go back convinced about the efficacy of our work,” says Harvilasben.
“Among the regular donors was a Naliniben Laijawala, a
resident of South Mumbai. She would give a donation of Rs10,000 every year on
one condition that we should visit her home and partake lunch or dinner. On one
such visit, while we were leaving, her maidservant, who had been listening to
our conversation, asked us hesitatingly if we would accept donation from her.
When we welcomed her offer, she rushed to the store room, brought back a bundle
of cloth in which she had kept her savings and emptied all its content. There
were coins amounting to Rs10 and 65 paise. We gave her a receipt for Rs11,”
recounted Harvilasben.
“In the last 40 years, we have received over Rs11
crore as donation from about 1200 to
1500 donors who include the likes of Naliniben, the lady of the house, as well
as her maid servant Janabai,” says Kantibhai. “The administrative cost of our
trust is little less than 10 per cent. Therefore, we are able to spend as much
as 90 per cent of the donation on development programmes,” he adds.
The Sarvodaya Parivar started fund collection drive
only after a severe drought struck Gujarat in 1973 when thousands of adivasis
faced starvation. With a collection of Rs94,000 from 691 donors, the Sarvodaya
Parivar distributed foodgrain among the famine-hit people firs at subsidized
rates, then to some as free and later as loan.
After this, the Sarvodaya Parivar conceived the idea
of establishing a ‘food grain bank’ from which it lends grains to the tribals
who returns the same amount of grain after a year to the bank. Earlier, the
tribals used to borrow foodgrain from traders of Dharampur at the beginning of
the monsoon and return double the amount after the harvesting of crops during
the Diwali festival.
Since 1973, Sarvodaya Parivar had also been providing
foodgrain which include nagli, wheat, jowar and paddy to the adivasis at Rs 1 a
kg till 1992, and at Rs2 after the market price nearly doubled. At present,
when no food grain is available at less than Rs10 a kg, the organization was
compelled to sell at Rs 5 a kg. Between 1973 and 2008, Sarvodaya Parivar has
distributed 15,983 tons of food grain entailing a subsidy of Rs 4.37 crore.
After ensuring food security for the adivasis, Parivar
decided to undertake the work of providing titled roof over the mud huts which
frequently got washed away during the monsoon. Each family needed at least
1,000 tiles to cover its roof. Parivar gives these titles to each tribal family
at one third the cost. In the last 28 years, Parivar has disbursed 25 million
tiles among the adivasis, enabling 25,000 families to live under a tiled roof.
With a view to providing employment at their doorstep,
Parivar introduced Ambar Charkha (hand-spinning machine, with six spindles) in
the region in 1978 with 25 units which increased to over 1,000 machines owned
by women in 32 villages. In 1987, pedal-operated looms were introduced to weave
khadi cloth from the yarn spun on the ambar charkhas. Today, there are 20 looms
in Pindval which gives employment to 40 youth. The centre at Pindval produces khadi
worth Rs 40 lakh in a year.
Parivar started a residential school in the campus
housing the khadi production centre in 1995 in which there are today 200 boys
and girls studying in class 1 to 7. Another residential school was started in
Khadki, 20 from Pindval, in which there are 230 students. The campuses of both
these schools have also been put to use for developing nurseries of various
types fruit-bearing plants that are distributed among the villagers for
carrying out forestation.
The fruits of last 40 years of work of Sarvodaya
Parivar can be seen in the form of lush green trees on the hills of surrounding
Pindval, titled roofs on the huts of the adivasis, clean and healthy children
residing in the two schools, hundreds of wells that have been recharged because
of the construction of check dams over rivulets and streams.
In recognition of their yeomen service, all the four
founders of Sarvodaya Parivar have received such prestigious awards as The
Jamnalal Bajaj Award jointly to Kantaben and Harvilasben, the Indian Merchants
Chamber’s Platinum Jubilee Endowment Award and the state-level ‘Darshak’ Award
to the trust.