Every day, women and girls are finding incredible confidence and taking risks. When they change one mind, pretty soon, they have changed one tradition. That changed tradition has changed a village. That one village has changed a country. That new reality means new opportunities for themselves and their daughters.
I always said that to get India stronger, first strengthen its roots, and all our roots are our country's interiors, rural areas, and villages.
Through Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana, we want to give impetus to Demand driven development model instead of Supply driven development model. Let the villages say what has to be done, and what not.
Railway stations can become growth points for the nearby villages.
My vision for the country is to urbanise rural areas. What is available in the cities must be available in the villages.
Good roads, good houses, adequate electricity, good schools or good hospitals in the village are indeed, the parameters of progress. However, in my view, 100 percent literate village is the true symbol of real progress.
If we have to build the nation we have to start from the villages. I will present a complete blueprint of "Sānsad Adharsh Grām Yojana" where each MP, must establish model villages in their constituencies.
Connectivity is productivity - whether it's in a modern office or an underdeveloped village.
You must think about building a 'granth-mandir' in your village. Why is your village lacking such a 'granth-mandir'? Start with 50 books...100 books.
Khaddar was conceived with a much more ambitious object, that is, to make our villages starvation-proof.
So you start one person at a time. Change one person, you can change a village.
I want to encourage more people in small villages to take up sports.
Love requires that true education should be easily accessible to all and should be of use to every villager in this daily life. The emphasis laid on the principle of spending every minute of one's life usefully is the best education for citizenship.
Khadi service, village service and Harijan service are one in reality, though three in name.
We have to tackle the triple malady which holds our villages fast in its grip; want of corporate sanitation, deficient diet and inertia.
Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.
If we want to impart education best suited to the needs of the villagers, we should take the vidyapith to the villages.
In Africa, you often see that the difference between a village where everybody eats and a village where people starve is government. One has a functioning government, and the other does not. Which is why it bothers me when I hear people say that government is the enemy. They don't understand its fundamental role.
