Bhoodan is a movement in India begun in 1951 by Vinoba
Bhave with the object of acquiring land for redistribution to landless
villagers. At first the object was to acquire individual plots, but from the
late 1950s an attempt was made to transfer ownership of entire villages to
village councils. The movement had a measure of success in Bihar state.
After India had independence, Vinoba started out on his extraordinary &
unprecedented in recorded history, the Bhoodan (Land-Gift)
Movement. Over a period of twenty years, Vinoba walked through the length &
breadth of India persuading land-owners & land-lords to give their poor &
downtrodden neighbors a total of four million acres of land.
Vinoba chose Bihar as a test case for examining the
potentialities of the Bhoodan Yatra. The number of workers there was
larger than elsewhere. Bhoodan shook Bihar to its foundations. Vinoba's
name became a household word there. The idea caught the minds of the masses and
became common talk all over the state. The new awakening brought about by
Bhoodan could be gauged by the growth of sale of Bhoodan and Vinoba literature.
Vinoba spent twenty-seven months in Bihar and made a visible dent on the land
problem in the state and made it possible for the Government to introduce more
progressive land reforms without much resistance from the people.
The Bhoodan-Gramdan movement initiated inspired by Vinoba
brought Vinoba to the international scene. In 1951,the Third Annual Sarvodaya
Conference was held at Shivarampali, a village a few miles south of the city of
Hyderabad in South India. Vinoba was persuaded to leave his community center
(Ashram) at Pavnar, near Nagpur & attend the meetings. Vinoba decided to walk
three hundred miles to Hyderabad. Telangana had been the scene of violent
communist rebellion which was still smoldering in April 1951. For Vinoba the
future of India was essentially a contest between the fundamental creeds of
Gandhi & Marx. In coming to Hyderabad, Vinoba & other Gandhians were
confronting a challenge & testing their faith in non-violence.
