Sarvodaya: Gandhi’s Word for Universal Welfare — MCQs with Answers (Set 1)

Trusteeship is a moral idea. It asks the wealthy to use wealth for the public good.

Article 39, in the Directive Principles, directs the state to secure the fair spread of material resources for the common good.

Bhoodan depended on persuasion and voluntary donation. It was started by Vinoba Bhave in 1951, after Gandhi’s death.

On 18 April 1951 at Pochampally, now in Telangana, a landowner offered about 100 acres. Vinoba Bhave then began asking other owners to give land.

Henry Polak, a friend of Gandhi in South Africa, handed him the book before the journey.

Gandhi read Ruskin’s Unto This Last on a train journey to Durban in 1904. He later adapted it into Gujarati.

Sarva means all and udaya means rise. Sarvodaya is the welfare of everyone, including the weakest person.

Vinoba walked about 58,000 km between 1951 and 1969, collecting roughly 4.2 million acres of donated land nationwide.

Gandhi’s followers met at Sevagram weeks after his assassination in January 1948, forming the Sarvodaya Samaj to continue his work.

Gandhi titled his 1908 Gujarati translation of John Ruskin’s ‘Unto This Last’ as Sarvodaya, meaning the welfare of all.

Bhave’s Bhoodan Movement began in the village of Pochampalli in the Telangana region, where a landless villager’s direct appeal for land moved Bhave to request voluntary land donations from local landowners, a method he then extended into a sustained nationwide campaign for voluntary land redistribution. The movement, though achieving only partial success in actually reallocating land at meaningful scale, represented a significant Gandhian-inspired attempt to address rural land inequality through moral persuasion rather than coercive state land reform. Bhave, a close associate of Gandhi and often regarded as his spiritual successor, extended this Gandhian constructive-programme tradition well into the post-independence decades, connecting the pre-independence reform movement’s legacy directly to newly independent India’s own social challenges.