Mahavira Jain Vidyalaya Rajat Jayanti Mahotsava

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 181

12
MANU SUBEDAR
[M. J. VIDYALAYA
have said: “We shall leave the question of selecting the crafts, finding the raw materials and selling the output, of finding the artisans and craftsmen who will teach the boys, and, generally, of organizing the scheme on the business side to those who understand these things." But they have not done so. Their own inability to penetrate the real inwardness of the scheme, they have turned into a weapon of attack. It is like the principal of an arts college being asked to organize a college of engineering or medicine, saying that the thing cannot be done. The mental inability to adjust themselves to mass (working class) requirement is patent in most of the comments which have been made.
CREATING SKILI.. Personally, I believe that the instinct of the Mahatma, who has devoted every moment of his time to the thought of the welfare of the Indian masses, is correct. It was a revelation to me, after many years of close study of the economic life and conditions of our country and many years of conscious effort to devise measures for putting an end to the poverty of India, that at one stroke Gandhiji should suggest the panacea, which would accomplish half a dozen purposes simultaneously. It is undoubtedly a scheme in which the burden of finance for education is to some extent to be transferred from the state to the robust self-help of the children. But this will be done under direction after forethought and with very great care and, therefore, without any harm. It is also a scheme which could be simultaneously adopted in several thousand villages in India in which a school on the modern plan cannot be set up. It is a scheme which will check the movement of men from the countryside to urban areas. It will create touch between the villages and the cities and give a sense of reality to both. It will create a movement of goods from the country to the city rather than vice versa as at present. Agents and canvassers of foreign goods have penetrated right inside with their wares, killing in the course of their onward march whatever local handicrafts still survived. This will be a movement from the countryside towards the cities. creating work and sending out goods, which will certainly affect imported wares, but which may also affect wares made in factories. Above all, the great merit of the scheme lies in recognizing the dignity of human beings, and in finding work for those who are otherwise going to be condemned to underemployment (and the demoralization consequent to it). It will also be the nucleus of a scheme for turning unskilled into skilled labour throughout India in the course of a generation,