Art of Living's movement launched its Swavlamban Movement in Bihar-Feb 13, 2011

AoL's movement launched in Bihar

Alok K N Mishra, TNN, Feb 13, 2011, 06.41pm IST


BIKRAM (PATNA): With the vision of creating stress-free and violence-free society, the Art of Living (AoL) Foundation on Sunday launched its Swavlamban Movement in Bihar.

"Our focus is on spreading awareness among villagers about various social ethics and values. Through this campaign, we want to make villages self-reliant with adoption of natural farming and water conservation, even while maintaining social harmony and unity," senior mentor with AoL Sanjay Kumar said.

Kumar was addressing a gathering of about 1,000 villagers here, about 40 km from Patna.

The main agenda of the Swavlamban Movement is to make villages conflict-free through active participation of local people.

"About 70% people are not contributing to the nation's development. The Swavlamban Movement will bring unity in villages, in districts, then in the state and the country. It will finally lead to development of the country," Kumar said.

"The villagers will also be encouraged to work towards removing the menace of drugs from the society. Special focus will be on checking corruption," he added.

The movement will lay stress on developing a sense of community spirit, so that villagers take on individual problems collectively and solve them easily.

"In the absence of this collective spirit, villagers unsuccessfully try to solve individual problems with their own might," the AoL mentor said.

The Swavlamban Movement has been successfully running in dozens of villages of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Kumar outlined the process of natural farming and its benefits to farmers. The villagers requested the Swavlamban Movement volunteers to constitute a committee on natural farming in Bikram, which is likely to be done within a week.

The Movement will be launched in Aurangabad district next month.

"The main idea of the movement is to organise a 'let's eat together and let's sing together programme' which brings about closeness among villagers," another senior mentor said. This programme will be organised in Bikram within a fortnight.

Legislators of Paliganj, Bikram and Arwal assembly constituencies, Usha Vidyarthi, Anil Kumar and Chitranjan Kumar respectively, also laid emphasis on encouraging unity amongst villagers to bring about development and peace in villages.