Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravishankar reassures farmers in suicide-prone Yavatmal district

YAVATMAL: Spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravishankar on his visit to a village in crisis-ridden Yavatmal on Monday said India has neglected agriculture sector for a long time, and it was time the country’s glory is revived through spiritual and collective action.

“We don’t encourage agriculture the way other nations do,” the Art of Living (AoL) founder said in an informal discussion with journalists on the way to village Bothbodan. “We must change it.”

The AoL founder is in Yavatmal to assess the work his volunteers engaged in villages and to interact with the beleaguered farmers for whom he held a satsang in the evening at Nehru Stadium in Yavatmal. He will address the government officials — collectors and revenue officials — today.

“We have seen the worst of droughts and floods, epidemics, wars and oppression, but people never committed suicide; they always fought those odds,” he said, while attributing suicides to a lack of support system — of spiritual and ethical support. “That system existed earlier in the form of teachers or moral leaders, but has broken down completely,” he said.

Hoping that the AoL will impart self-confidence in farmers, he said, “If we get rid our spirituality, we will be doomed and could end up like Kosovo.”

Lauding the Maharashtra government for admitting that farmers were in crisis and that something more needs to be done other than doling out packages, the spiritual guru vouched for a collective mechanism in villages. “We provide experience and enormous strength to farmers to help them endure and generate creative ideas to overcome the crisis; we tell them it’s not the end of the road,” he said.

Stating that satsangs could bring about collective and pro-active action, he said, “I don’t want my country to be an Ethiopia, where people sit and expect aid and think it’s their right. The country must grow more food and go for zero-budget farming.”

The spiritual guru felt farmers too must take initiative. “We want to empower people to come out of the crisis, but they too will have to take initiative. On the other hand, the government and corporates must be supportive to them.”

As the governments are well aware of the situation, “it will be a sheer waste of energy to offer suggestions to them,” he said, adding that, “But we would have loved more support from the state government, as it would speed up our work.”

Reflecting on the growing inequality in India , he said the consumerism has to come down and it will, if India’s spiritualism grows the world over. “We want India’s Bhakti movement to be reintroduced in our education,” he advocated.

However, he said India has been a beneficiary of globalisation. “There are drawbacks to every system, but I won’t subscribe to a socialist system; we have seen what happened to Russia in a controlled-economy,” he said.

“It’ll be a guru dakshina for me,” he said, “if you do away with your caste-wise and political divisions and join hands for a collective fight against the crisis.”

When a farmer activist pointed out that the cotton prices were on the decline, he replied: “You can grow vegetables, construct farm ponds to harvest rainwater and make villages self-sufficient. But suicide certainly is no solution.”

Advocating organic farming, the spiritual guru said: “We have poisoned our soil and land and the poison has now spread in our lives.” Later, he sought a pledge from them: “Neither we will commit suicide, nor allow any one else in the village to do it.”