Page:Gandhi - The Wheel of fortune.djvu/36

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18
THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

cottages. I therefore consider Swadeshi as an automatic, though partial, solution of the problem of India’s grinding poverty. It also constitutes a ready-made insurance policy in times of scarcity of rain.

But two things are needful to bring about the needed revival—to create a taste for Khaddar and to provide an organisation for the distribution of carded cotton and collection of yarn against payment.

In one year, by the silent labour of a few men, several thousand rupees have been distributed in Gujarat among several thousand poor women who are glad enough to earn a few per day to buy milk for their children, etc.

The argument does not apply to the sugar industry as the “Leader” has attempted. There is not sufficient cane grown in India to supply India’s wants. Sugar was never a national and supplementary industry. Foreign sugar has not supplanted Indian sugar. India’s wants of sugar have grown and she therefore imports more sugar. But this importation does not institute a drain in the sense in which importation of