Q1.
There are many more such examples of people coming together to do something for the benefit of the community without expecting anything in return. Have you heard of any?
Answer
Yes — such examples are everywhere, once you start looking. Here are some well-known ones, and then the kind you can find in your own street.
| Example | What people did together, unpaid |
|---|---|
| Shramdaan (‘gift of labour’) | Villagers give a day’s work to clean a pond, repair a bund, level a path or desilt a canal. In Rajasthan, Maharashtra and many other States, entire village tanks have been revived this way |
| Community kitchens | Free meals cooked and served to anyone who comes — langar at gurudwaras, annadānam at temples, meals distributed by mosques, churches and local groups, especially during floods and other disasters |
| The Kerala floods (2018) | Fishermen took their own boats inland and rescued thousands of stranded people; students and volunteers ran relief camps and sorted supplies for weeks |
| Cleanliness drives | Neighbourhood and school groups clearing a beach, a riverbank, a park or a market street, and separating waste — often on Gandhi Jayanti or under Swachh Bharat |
| Blood donation and health camps | Colleges, workplaces and residents’ groups organising donation camps and free check-ups; volunteers giving blood for strangers |
| Village and colony libraries | People donating books and one room, and taking turns to keep a small free library or an evening study centre open for children — very like Kamal Parmar’s classes |
| Help during an epidemic or a lockdown | Neighbours delivering groceries and medicines to elderly people living alone, and volunteers running food packets to those who had lost work |
Sample answer for your notebook: Yes. In our colony, when the drain overflowed after heavy rain last year, about thirty people — shopkeepers, students, two autorickshaw drivers and several homemakers — came out with spades and buckets on a Sunday morning and cleared it, and one family sent tea for everybody. Nobody was paid and nobody was in charge. Our sweeper, who lives nearby, showed us where the blockage was.
What all these have in common: people do the work as a duty, not for payment — exactly as the Bhils did in the halma tradition, whose stated objective “is to serve Mother Earth”. Look at the photographs on page 145: hundreds of people digging trenches across a whole hillside, walking to the site with their own tools, drums being played as they work, and a pond full of water where a dry slope used to be. Nobody in those pictures is a paid worker.
Do this: ask an elder in your family for one example from their own life — a well dug, a school room built, a road repaired, a wedding managed by the whole street. Write it down with the year. That is a piece of your community’s history.