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In the service of the village
WHEN THE Indo-UK Initiative recently organised a conference on "Socially Responsible Corporate Citizenship: Issues and Challenges", and a wide range of issues were covered, I missed having even one session focus on links between corporates and volunteer citizens' organisations and a further link of both the government. The loudest cheers, however, were for case studies presented by two private initiatives. Dr.S.S. Badrinath's Sankara Nethralaya is too well-known to be relooked all over again. But little known in India is the silver-maned Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne, described by many as the `Sri Lankan Gandhi' and who himself says that all he's doing is following in the footsteps of the Mahatma. Whether you agree or not with such descriptions, there is no gainsaying that Ariyaratne's Lanka Jathika Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya is perhaps the largest non-government organisation in the Island and has contributed the most to the development of rural Sri Lanka - by the people themselves.
There was till the 18th Century an ancient Sri Lankan tradition called Rajakariya. Every citizen had to do a certain amount of service every year for the king, but would really be contributing to the improvement of infrastructure, like roads, irrigation systems etc for the common good. It was a system which quickly died out with the British moving into the Island in 1796. It is for a revival of that system, not for the state but for the community to better its own lot through Shramadana, voluntary service, that Ariyaratne has been responsible.
When we met at the conference the other day, we talked of the first feature articles of his first step that I had published in 1958. He was a 27-old schoolmaster at the time, teaching in a school in Colombo, when he persuaded a group of students and teachers to volunteer their labour, to gift it as service, and join hands with the people of the backward village Kanatoluwa. And together, Colombo schoolboys and teachers and villagers, cleared land for home gardens, scooped out pits behind homes to serve as latrines, and sank wells. During subsequent visits, they helped tend the vegetable plots, organise classes for the children and literacy programmes for the adults, and advised on hygiene and child and maternity care. That the volunteer group kept returning to the village again and again is what struck most of us writing about that first step in Shramadana. But what began then has spread beyond what any of us dreamed of at the time; only Ariyaratne had the faith that the movement would became an all-Island one. Today, Sarvodaya has a record of having initiated Shramadana projects in 8000 of Sri Lanka's 23,000 villages - including villages in the battle-scarred North and East. In 2000 of these villages, Sarvodaya has helped set up registered societies which offer banking facilities - and Ariyaratne looks forward to more societies being established to enable village development through intermediate, environment-friendly indigenous technologies and total village participation in project that will help alleviate poverty and improve standards of living.
All this is just what the Ariyaratne of 1958 had dreamed of and found few believers at the time. But with the growth of Shramadana Movement into Sarvodaya, incorporated in 1972 by a special Act of Parliament, Ariyaratne has himself begun to add a spiritual dimension to the pragmatism he once displayed and continues to practise. And it is this spiritualism, the constant references to religious philosophy, that dominated his presentation at the recent conference. Gandhiji for all his spirituality always spoke in more practical, more down-to-earth terms and less in terms of philosophy of any religion.
One such down-to-earth presentation was by Central Vigilance Commissioner P. Shankar who wondered about corporate responsibility when it came to taking shareholders' money and offering them only losses in return. He wondered whether it was not time for SEBI to begin to take to task companies who had sold shares to the public at high prices but whose shares today are virtually not worth the paper the promises were made on. It would have been a more successful conference, if more speakers were as outspoken as Commissioner Shankar.
S. MUTHIAH
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