Comment in 150 words: Gandhian perspective of development and its contemporary relevance. (2013, 10 Marks)
For M. K. Gandhi, development meant the growth of the person, not merely of output. Its end was swaraj — self-rule of the individual, the village and the nation — and its test was moral. First set out in Hind Swaraj (1909), the perspective was set aside by India’s planners as archaic; today it reads as an early charter of sustainable, people-centred development.
The Gandhian perspective
- Three pillars at once: material sufficiency, distributive justice and moral regeneration. Growth without the other two was not development.
- Sarvodaya and antyodaya: the welfare of all, beginning with the last person. His talisman — will this step help the poorest face you have seen? — rejects the utilitarian sacrifice of a minority for aggregate gain.
- Basic needs first: food and cloth for every Indian through land redistribution, cooperative farming, khadi and cottage industry, within self-reliant, self-governing villages.
- Production by the masses, not mass production: he opposed not machines but labour-displacing machinery in a labour-surplus, capital-poor economy.
- Trusteeship and the limitation of wants: wealth held in trust for society; progress measured by needing less rather than consuming more.
Contemporary relevance
- Ecology: the “need, not greed” ethic recorded by his secretary Pyarelal anticipates the idea of planetary limits; E. F. Schumacher‘s Small Is Beautiful (1973) and India’s Mission LiFE (2022) restate it.
- Work: with agriculture still holding 43% of workers (PLFS 2025), labour-absorbing rural enterprise answers jobless growth. The khadi and village industries sector reported a record ₹1.87 lakh crore turnover and 2.04 crore jobs in 2025-26.
- Inequality: inequality cuts India’s HDI by 30.7% (HDR 2025) — the antyodaya test in statistical form. Amartya Sen‘s capability approach shares Gandhi’s refusal to equate growth with well-being.
- Global South: his warning that the Western consumption model cannot be universalised underlies India’s per-capita equity argument in climate negotiations.
- Policy vocabulary: PM Vishwakarma for traditional artisans and “vocal for local” borrow his language of swadeshi.
Limits
The model has no theory of capital accumulation or scale, idealises a caste-ridden village, and leans on voluntary trusteeship that the rich rarely honour. Policy also takes the vocabulary more than the substance: khadi survives as subsidised marketing, not as a mode of production.
Conclusion
Gandhi’s perspective cannot by itself run an industrial economy of 1.4 billion people, but it supplies what growth models lack — a criterion: development counts only if it reaches the last person without exhausting the earth.