The contemporaneity of Charan Singh’s ideas informs us how little India has changed since Independence as we struggle with an agrarian crisis where 47% of our impoverished population remains engaged in non-remunerative agricultural livelihoods. In addition, as Covid strikes at the heart of human activity, the ugly innards of the urban, post-industrial exploitative structure lie fully exposed. Our rural brothers and sisters flee the slums of the cities for their villages from where, ironically, they had migrated to earn a living. In Singh’s ideal world our megacities would not have become the capital sinks of an ecologically unsustainable life.

Charan Singh proposed a Gandhian alternative, one Indians can reacquaint themselves through this collector set ‘Selected Works of Charan Singh’ which includes 6 of his major works and an easy-to-read summary of each of these books: Abolition of Zamindari (1947), Joint Farming X-Rayed (1959), India’s Poverty and Its Solution (1964), India’s Economic Policy: The Gandhian Blueprint (1978), Economic Nightmare of India (1981) and Land Reforms in U.P. and the Kulaks (1986). These books plead for the centrality of villages, agriculture and hand-made local industry in India’s political economy.

Charan Singh was born on 23 December 1902 in Meerut District of Uttar Pradesh in an illiterate tenant farmer's modest village hut. He completed his B.Sc., M.A. in History and LL. B and later joined the Indian National Congress at 27 in the struggle to free India. He was imprisoned by the British government in 1930, 1940, and 1942. He was a member of the Legislature of Uttar Pradesh from 1936 to 1974 and a minister in Congress governments from 1946 to 1967. Singh became Chief Minister in 1967 and again in 1970. He served in the Union Government as Cabinet Minister for Home and Finance (1977-79) and Prime Minister in 1979-80. He remained a figure of major political significance in the Eighties till he passed away on 29 May 1987.