Community development : the quest v.1

Rolling stone gathers no moss. For a stone to continue rolling, there must be a pressure from behind ever pushing it ahead. The same applies to the perennially flowing water in a mighty river. The Ganga does not dry up during the summer. She continues being fed by melting snows which gather at the highest pinnacle of the Himalayas and serve as the eternal reservoir.

The culture of a people is something very similar to the flow of the Ganga. It is not static. It is in perennial adjustment. Culture must have vitality and depth. It must be free from fetters. It must have a reservoir of thoughts and spirit behind. The higher the pinnacles and deeper the snow line, more vital and health giving is culture down below in the level plains.

Community Development was inaugurated in India a short seven year ago as a pilot to give a push to the slumbering nation, to furnish it with a new urge, a new programme. The programme was designed to grow in the course of time into a people's movement building the country all over again, raising it to a new level of culture and bringing it to the comity of nations from where she could begin to play her role in the world once again. Community Development, if it is to be a movement of the people, a new melody in culture, must have behind a philosophy, a perennial reservoir of the spirit and thoughts of the nation.