Charan Singh was born 23 December 1902 “in an ordinary peasant farmers home under a thatched roof supported by kachcha mud walls, with a kachcha well … for drinking water and irrigation”. This infant born into poverty in a landless farmers mud hut in Noorpur village in Meerut district of the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) was to rise to become the most prominent voice of the village in independent India.

This is his brief life history, from Congress nationalist, freedom fighter to politician, and an ‘organic rural intellectual’ articulating an alternative development thinking on agriculture and village and rural industries on Gandhian lines.