Namita Nimbalkar

Gandhian economics includes the study of all relevant economic activities having a relevance to Indian conditions. These activities include production, distribution, consumption, public finance and sarvodaya. Truth and non-violence are at the core of Gandhian economics. It refers to all such economic activities in which material well-being of all human beings is regarded as the central point. Gandhi’s khadi movement was ideologically woven around the need to provide supplementary work to idle or underemployed rural hands. Hence, khadi required simple, comprehensible technology and a local resource base for both its production and consumption. It was round this constructive ideology that a political movement was built. The khadi movement was a campaign to establish a non–violent economic order. As Gandhi’s social experiment, khadi was to be a national industry in the interest of the masses. It was important from the point of view of the diminution of unemployment, increase in national production, increase in the purchasing power of the poor and the collective wealth of the nation. It was his basic and elemental humanism, ultimately based on the spiritual experience of oneness of being, the root of his economic and social theories and practice.