A renowned Gandhian and a cooperator who founded the world famous ”Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) Ela Bhatt has advocated building holistic and mutually beneficial communities , in her latest book ‘ Anubandh’.
Such communities she argues could easily meet the basic needs of their life such as food, water, clothing, health, housing, education and bank. Ela Bhatt’s idea is akin to that of Gandhi’s idea of self-sustaining village communities.
Bhatt has been a brand ambassador of the cooperative movement and was handpicked by the govt in the past to be on the RBI Board. She is believed to have learnt her first lesson in cooperative from the novel concept of Kibbutz in Israel.
The authoress believes even poverty, human exploitation and ecological disaster could be tackled through mutually beneficial communities.
The book is based on Bhatt’s experience in building networks of poor women in villages in India and elsewhere through SEWA, making more than a million women self-reliant and self-employed.