Gandhi, from Hind Swaraj (1909) onward, argued that India's true life lay in self-reliant villages rather than in industrial cities, advocating decentralised production, khadi and local self-government. His ideal of gram swaraj envisaged self-sufficient village republics as the basic unit of a free India, and he was deeply sceptical of the metropolis. The vision shaped rural-development policy and stood as a persistent counter-current to urban-industrial planning.
It provided an influential anti-urban, decentralist ideal that has long pulled Indian development thinking toward the village.
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