The Khadi Unit Running Out of Corpus
A sarvodaya ashram in Wardha district runs a khadi and village industries unit: 18 hand-spinners with an average age of 62 (11 women, 6 from Dalit families), 4 handlooms and a small ghee unit. Monthly turnover is Rs 1.9 lakh. After a Pune retail chain cancelled its order and polyester-cotton blends entered the local market, the unit loses Rs 47,000 a month and has consumed Rs 6 lakh of its corpus in eight months. The manager proposes buying two power looms and using blended yarn, forecasting a monthly surplus of Rs 30,000. A trustee wants to close the unit and start a tailoring unit for 10 younger women.
The ashram also runs a school with 74 students, 22 of them Dalit. The women of 9 Dalit families still clean the village drain for Rs 200 a month paid by the temple committee. The annual general body meets in three weeks.
1. Test the manager's proposal against the purposes Gandhi gave for khadi, not against nostalgia.
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Gandhi gave khadi four purposes: supplementary employment in the idle agricultural months; village self-reliance, so that cloth is made where it is consumed; identification with the poor through bread labour; and swadeshi as a moral act rather than a market strategy. The test of any change is therefore whether it increases village employment, local ownership and self-respect, not whether it improves the ashram's margin.
Against that test, two power looms may pass the first part if they are locally owned and powered and displace no spinner; they fail if they replace hand labour, because two power looms will out-produce 18 spinners. Blend yarn fails a different test entirely: khadi is by definition hand-spun and hand-woven, so a blended fabric cannot carry the khadi mark or the Khadi and Village Industries Commission certification. The Rs 30,000 surplus would be earned by selling something else under the ashram's name - a question of honesty, not of taste.
Vinoba's test was simpler than Gandhi's and stricter: a machine that removes drudgery is welcome; a machine that removes the worker is not.
2. Choose among the three options using the numbers given, and state what you would do about the 18 spinners.
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The arithmetic first: Rs 47,000 a month is Rs 5.64 lakh a year, and the remaining corpus is Rs 6 lakh - about twelve months of life. The power-loom plan turns the loss into a Rs 30,000 surplus, a swing of Rs 77,000, but it needs capital the ashram does not have and it destroys the khadi certification; it also cannot absorb 18 spinners. Closure with a tailoring unit employs 10 and displaces all 18 - the oldest, poorest and least employable members, which is exactly the wrong group to sacrifice.
Choose a third option that protects the core and buys time. Keep hand-spinning and handloom as the identity. Raise realisation by direct and online sales with the unit's story; start an 'adopt a spinner' scheme at Rs 2,500 a month for a year, which brings Rs 5.4 lakh and covers the loss; add a natural-dye block-printing line and expand the ghee unit for four more workers; and cut overhead rather than wages.
For the spinners: a guaranteed 100 days of spinning at a fixed piece rate, a pension-type support for the three or four above 65, and a written assurance that no power loom will be bought while any spinner wants work. Buy a power loom only if a separate village producers' company, with the 18 as shareholders, uses it for grey cloth for the ashram's own stitching - never for blended khadi.
3. What should the ashram say and do about the drain-cleaning families, given that it needs the temple committee's cooperation for its school?
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Do not treat this as a separate file from the khadi loss. Gandhi placed removal of untouchability second only to communal unity in the constructive programme, and he held sanitation to be more important than political independence. An ashram cannot ask the market to value its cloth while accepting that nine families are paid Rs 200 for work the law abolished.
Facts first: who employs them, the written or unwritten contract with the temple committee, whether the panchayat owns a mechanical cleaner, and whether the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 applies to this work.
Actions: residents and trustees clean the drain with the families for one day as shramdan - this converts a sermon into an act and exposes who benefits from the arrangement; a written demand to the panchayat for protective gear and rehabilitation; a negotiation with the temple committee beginning with the annual fair and the bhajan mandal rather than the sanctum; and a line in the annual report and in the school's admission policy.
The risk is real: the committee may withdraw cooperation and the school may lose its premises. Accept that risk. An ashram that keeps a convenient school but keeps silent about this has lost the reason it exists.