TheSarvodaya Shramadana Movement (Sinhala:සර්වෝදය) is aself-governance movement inSri Lanka, which provides comprehensive development andconflict resolution programs to villages. It is also the largest indigenous organization working on reconstruction from thetsunami caused by the2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Founded in 1958 byA. T. Ariyaratne when he took “forty high school students and twelve teachers fromNalanda College Colombo on “an educational experiment” to anoutcaste village, Kathaluwa, and helped the villagers fix it up.
As of 2006, Sarvodaya staff people and programs are active in some 15,000 (of 38,000) villages in Sri Lanka. The organization estimates that 11 million citizens are individual beneficiaries of one of its programs. The group distributes funds from a financial reserve bank of 1.6 billionrupees.[1]
The Sarvodaya movement belongs to theGlobal Ecovillage Network.[2]
The movement is based onBuddhist andGandhian principles. Coined byMohandas Gandhi, the termssarvodaya ' means 'welfare for all'. The word shramadana means 'gift of labour'.[1] Collectively, the name 'Sarvodaya Shramadana' means 'welfare for all through our shared labour'.[3][1]
In 1958, the neglected village ofRodiya, inhabited by social outcasts and beggars, received help in the form of renovating houses, digging wells and latrines, and establishing community gardens; educational programs and self-employment help were also launched. The organizer wasD. A. Abeysekera, an employee of the Sri Lankan Department of Rural Development, who while searching for solutions for this kind of community coined the term Shramadana, meaning 'gift of labour', to describe the type of help expected from volunteers. The village of Kathaluwa was to be the first beneficiary of this joint work.
Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne, then a young teacher atNalanda College inColombo, led a group of teachers and students who participated in what he called an "educational experiment." The success of the "experiment", repeated in other villages, and developing independently from the Department of Rural Development, led to the creation of the largest development-promoting organization in Sri Lanka - The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement.[4]
Activists led by Ariyaratne tried to meet the real needs of the villagers. To this end, they conducted research in 600 villages, asking residents to list their ten most important needs, in order from most urgent to least important. The survey resulted in a list of the following needs:[3]
The Sarvodaya program begins with an invitation from a village for a discussion of what is needed and how it can be done. It proceeds in stages through creating a village council, building a school and clinic, setting up family programs, creating economic opportunity so that the village economy becomes self-sustaining, starting a village bank, and offering help to other villages. In addition, Sarvodaya sponsors public meditations in which tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians meditate together on each other's welfare, using the BuddhistBrahmavihara (sublime attitude) meditations, which are acceptable within all faiths.
Assistance deliberately begins with a change in the attitude of the villagers, and satisfying basic needs is only the third stage. The organization insists on understanding the real needs of a peaceful,sustainable society.[6] A.T. Ariyaratne emphasizes that Sarvodaya is about awakening both individuals and society.[7]
The next five steps are:[6]
Fusion – Sarvodaya ICT4D Movement is the ICT for development (ICT4D) program. As a response to the emerging digital divide issues of rural Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya started setting up telecentres experimentally in 1997. This has led to the pioneeringtelecentre program in the country. Village Information Centres (popularly known as VICs) are rural libraries, set up by village youth leaders as 'Zero Cost' village initiatives, which prepare disadvantaged, less educated rural communities for the information age. Out of the 172 VICs initiated since early 2000, there are about 21 VICs graduated to their own forms of telecentres by mid-2008.
In September 2012,Etisalat Sri Lanka, a mobile telephony provider in cooperation with Sarvodaya-Fusion, opened Etisalat Android Village Hub. The program aims to connect rural communities usingAndroidtablets, which the company distributed to 20 families in selected villages for a period of two weeks and conduct internet training.[8]
Author John P. Clark has argued that the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement areanarchist in their organisation and goals, noting their inspiration from the philosophical anarchistMahatma Gandhi.[9]
On December 26, 2004, at 9 am, waves flooded the fishing town ofHambantota. The director of one of the institutes for sustainable agriculture in Sarvodaya,Nandana Jayasinghe, was about an hour away from the tragedy, inThanamalwila next toUdawalawe National Park. After 6 hours he arrived in the town with three 10-ton trucks full of food, water, blankets and other means of survival. In the following days, he organized the next deliveries, and temporary housing for the population and, along with other volunteers in the movement, helped clean up and reorganize the town after the tragedy. The movement participated in helping the region many years after the tsunami.[10] The tsunami destroyed 226 villages belonging to the Sarvodaya movement.[11]
In total, the movement built 1104 houses, 5593 toilets, 2274 wells, 2450 waste composters, 185 water tanks and 85 playgrounds for the victims of the tsunami.[10] The Sarvodaya movement tried to get help from recipients themselves, in order for them to feel responsible and take part in rebuilding their own lives.[11]
