In its 91st year, RSS plans to reach each of 600,000 villages of India

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The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will complete 90 years of its inception on Vijayadashami on Thursday with the resolve to reach India’s 600,000 villages in the next one year. Currently, the RSS is active largely in urban centres.

“As a rule, the Sangh does not mark anniversaries. But the organisation has set for itself certain goals for the next one year. The primary task ahead of us is expanding our network in rural areas,” an RSS spokesperson said.

The RSS has witnessed exponential growth in the number of its volunteers as well as shakhas in the last couple of years. The RSS acknowledges that a pracharak having become the prime minister of the country has added to the Sangh’s attraction among the urban youth. But it now wants to reach rural areas as well.

The Sangh has charted out a plan to divide the 600,000 villages in groups of 10 each. Each such grouping is called a khand or block. It plans to have a shakha in each of the 60,000 blocks by October 2016. The motto of these village shakhas will be to motivate people to end caste discrimination. RSS workers will appeal to villagers to have ek kuan, ek mandir, ek shmashan or ‘one temple, one well and one crematorium’ for all castes in a village.  

Its fraternal organisations such as Ekal Vidyalayas (one-teacher schools in rural and tribal areas) have drawn their own expansion plans. The organisation aims to increase the number of such schools from the current 40,000 to 100,000 in the next one year.

Similarly, each of the over 51,000 RSS shakhas have been asked to take up a social service projects, ranging from working for cleanliness of the locality, improving temple management or even starting a tuition or computer centres for the poor.

Currently, the RSS has 51,330 shakhas at 33,222 places. The RSS also has 12,847 saptahik milan or weekly meetings for professionals and 9,008 sangh mandali for women. The Sangh claims to have 90 million volunteers across India and “active presence in 47 countries”.

The RSS was established on the Vijayadashami day in 1925 and spread to all the states by 1940 and all districts of India in the early 1980s. The Sangh celebrates its founding day every year on the occasion of Vijayadashami. On Thursday, the main event will take place at its headquarters in Nagpur. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will address the volunteers. The speech, according to an RSS spokesperson, will be telecast live by 17 news channels, including state broadcaster Doordarshan.

Former Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) chairman and NITI Aayog member Vijay Kumar Saraswat will be the chief guest.

Union Transport and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, among others, are expected to attend the event.
MARCHING AHEAD

• RSS was founded in 1925
• It was presence in each state by 1940 and in nearly each of India’s over 600 districts by early 1980s
• It is present in 47 countries
• Plans to reach most of the villages in the country by end-2016
• Claims to have 90 million volunteers
• At present, RSS has 51,330 shakhas at 33,222 places