About this stamp
Nanaji Deshmukh
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 11 October 2017, his birth centenary, for Nanaji Deshmukh (1916–2010), social worker and pioneer of rural self-reliance. Chandikadas Amritrao Deshmukh was born on 11 October 1916 at Kadoli in the Hingoli district of Maharashtra, lost his parents early and was brought up by his maternal uncle. Inspired by Lokamanya Tilak, he worked closely with Dr K. B. Hedgewar and Deendayal Upadhyaya, whom he first met in 1940.
Politics
In 1947 he was managing director of the journals Rashtradharma and Panchjanya and the paper Swadesh, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as editor. As general secretary of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in Uttar Pradesh he built its units in every district by 1957. He took part in Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement and backed Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for Total Revolution. Elected to the Lok Sabha from Balrampur in 1977, he declined a cabinet post, and in 1980, at sixty, he left politics.
Rural Development
He gave the rest of his life to work in villages, through the Deendayal Research Institute he had founded in 1972 on the philosophy of Integral Humanism. After experiments in Gonda and Beed he shaped a model covering health, education, agriculture and livelihoods, “total transformation through total development with people’s participation”, and carried it to over 500 villages in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan.
The stamp was designed by Nenu Gupta; Security Printing Press, Hyderabad printed 0.5 million.
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