Page 221 - SocialHarmony

Poor Welfare Fair: Service to Humanity 225

not be any middleman now. It is a government scheme, and
you are eligible for it. It is a budget which has been made with
the public fund. Therefore, every paise of the fund should be
utilized for the poor people’s welfare, this money should be
delivered at the poor man’s house; and this is the reason that
the government itself has approached the poor man’s house.

I discussed this scheme with all government officials right
from a peon to a collector, and then they all went to all villages,
small and big, they went house-to-house, and found out where
this scheme was needed the most. They went round seven tehsils
and concluded that 32,000 people should be given the benefit
of this scheme, those 32,000 beneficiaries meant 32,000 families,
who are eligible to get government aid. Today under this tent,
in the presence of thousands of people and television cameras,
a big sum of 30 crore will be disbursed among these poor people.

If a poor person has no house to live, no place to keep his
feet, where can he go then? There is a government scheme by
which a poor homeless person should be given a plot of land
for a house, but a poor man has to suffer much to get that plot;
he just keeps sending applications after applications, all to no
avail. Therefore, we have decided that we should set out to
search for the poor people who are homeless, and then give
them the plots, and let us start a campaign for this purpose. If
the government has no land, then it should specify land in the
villages. If required, private land should be acquired to allot to
these homeless people. I am proud to say that all the plots given
to the poor people ever since the State of Gujarat came into being
in 1960, fall short of the number of plots that are being allotted
in this one month, and it is no trivial matter.

You are well aware of the value of land. The brothers in a
family fight over half a foot of land, they may go to any extent
for this, cracks may appear in the village, and we are aware
that all this is due to the value of land. Land is very powerful in
life. It amounts to billions of rupees, friends. If you calculate
the value of land that the government has allotted to the poor
people, it would come to billions of rupees. When I started to
make deeds for land, my friends in the Congress filed a writ