Today, more than ever, we need Gandhi’s economic wisdom | The Indian Express

Today, more than ever, we need Gandhi’s economic wisdom | The Indian Express

Written by Prasanna |Updated: October 19, 2019 11:45:05 am

Prasanna is a Kannada playwright and founder of Gram Seva Sangh

Today, more than ever, we need Gandhi’s economic wisdom

Gandhiji’s economy is sacred and also scientific. We don’t realise that Gandhiji, though he donned the dress of a villager, was an urban mind.

We should realise that Gandhiji was a Rama bhakt. For him, political independence went along with constructing a Rama rajya or a civilisation that is decent.

We definitely need Gandhi. But the point is: How do we utilise his wisdom to sort out the mess we have created in the last seven decades? When you look at it this way, you realise that you have to take Gandhi’s economic wisdom, rather than the many, many other things that he did. What is Gandhi’s economic wisdom? J C Kumarappa called it “economy of permanence”. But I call it “sacred economy” because Gandhi, in a fundamental sense, married the sacred and the economic, while all of us, in the last seven decades, have been separating the two.