NDA (II) 2022 General Ability Test · Question 122 of 150

Correct — B, Vinoba Bhave. Acharya Vinoba Bhave began the Bhoodan, or land-gift, movement on 18 April 1951 at Pochampally in what is now Telangana, after meeting eighty Harijan families who had no land. When he asked whether anyone present would give land for them, a local landowner offered a hundred acres, and Bhave turned the moment into a nationwide campaign — walking village to village and appealing to landowners to donate land voluntarily to the landless. From 1954 he widened the appeal into Gramdan, asking whole villages to place their land in common ownership, and secured more than a thousand villages.

• (a)Ram Prasad Bismil — Ram Prasad Bismil belonged to the revolutionary strand of the freedom struggle and was executed in 1927 for the Kakori train action of 1925. He was not alive in 1951, and his politics of armed revolution is the opposite of a voluntary land-donation appeal.
• (c)Mahatma Gandhi — This is the intended trap, because Bhoodan is a thoroughly Gandhian idea and Bhave was Gandhi's disciple, chosen by him as the first individual satyagrahi in 1940. But Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, three years before the movement began at Pochampally.
• (d)Kanhu Murmu — Kanhu Murmu was a leader of the Santhal rebellion of 1855 against moneylenders and colonial authority — a nineteenth-century armed uprising over land, not a twentieth-century movement of voluntary donation.

Bhoodan was an attempt to achieve land reform by moral persuasion rather than legislation. Instead of the state acquiring surplus land through ceiling laws, Bhave walked across the country asking landowners to give a share of their holdings as a gift for redistribution to the landless. The movement drew directly on Gandhian ideas of trusteeship, in which wealth is held for society rather than owned absolutely, and it ran alongside the statutory land-reform measures the states were enacting in the same years.

Three of the four names are separated by simple chronology, so the safest route through this question is to date each one. Kanhu Murmu belongs to 1855, Ram Prasad Bismil died in 1927, Gandhi was killed in January 1948, and the movement began in April 1951 — which leaves only Bhave. Beyond the exam it is worth holding the two-stage structure of what he built. Bhoodan asked for gifts of land from individual owners from 1951, and Gramdan from 1954 asked entire villages to pool their land, which is the finer distinction examiners use when they want a harder version of this question. Bhave lived from 1895 to 1982, was the first recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1958, and was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1983.

• Vinoba Bhave began the Bhoodan movement on 18 April 1951 at Pochampally, in present-day Telangana.
• The first donation was a hundred acres, offered after Bhave met eighty landless Harijan families in the village.
• From 1954 the campaign was widened into Gramdan, in which whole villages donated their land, covering more than a thousand villages.
• Gandhi had chosen Bhave as the first individual satyagrahi in 1940, which is why the movement is read as Gandhian in descent.
• Bhave lived from 1895 to 1982, received the first Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1958, and was given the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1983.

• Choosing Gandhi because the movement is Gandhian in spirit — he had died three years before it began.
• Confusing Bhoodan, the gift of land by individual owners, with Gramdan, the donation of a whole village's land.
• Placing the first donation in Bihar; the movement began at Pochampally in the Telangana region.

As this who-started-it question, as a place-of-first-donation item, or as a statement set testing what Bhoodan aimed at and how it differed from statutory land reform.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bhoodan movement was launched in the year

  • (a)1947
  • (b)1951
  • (c)1955
  • (d)1961

  Answer(b) 1951 — Vinoba Bhave received the first land donation at Pochampally on 18 April that year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The phase of Vinoba Bhave's campaign in which entire villages donated their land was called

  • (a)Sampattidan
  • (b)Gramdan
  • (c)Sarvodaya
  • (d)Shramdan

  Answer(b) Gramdan — begun in 1954, it extended Bhoodan from individual owners to whole villages.