THE MAKING OF BABA AMTE ... contd
With his children increasingly taking over his life's work, Baba Amte was ready to move on to a larger national canvas. The Somnath project culminated in the late 1980s in the famous "Knit India Movement" which Baba launched to reunite a country divided by communal and separatist strife. Thousands of young men and women joined him on bicycles on this quest to knit India from Kanyakumari in the deep South, to Kashmir in the far North, and from Arunachal in the neglected North East to the Western coastline of Gujarat, covering a total distance of 7500 kms. The march took him to the precincts of the Golden-temple at Amritsar, which had become the flashpoint of discontent among the youth of Punjab.
The decade of the 1990s has seen Baba Amte engaged in a struggle to build an alternative model of development for India based on the principles of equity, sustainability and people's empowerment.
“A chain of human hands, a fence of human legs”. Protesting the construction of the Inchampalli-Bhopalpatnam megadams on River Indrawati.