Maharaja Agrasen’s “One Rupee, One Brick” and the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s (VHP’s) Social Philosophy: A Comparative study into Community-Based Resource Pooling

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural–institutional bridge between Maharaja Agrasen’s legendary “One Rupee, One Brick” compact—where every settled family aids a newcomer with one coin and one brick—and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) ethos of seva (service) and community pooling across health, education, and social harmony initiatives. Framed within Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS)—especially dāna (charity), yajña-bhāva (cooperative offering), and kutumba (enlarged familyhood)—it interprets how a simple social norm became a scalable “social technology,” and how modern seva networks operationalize similar values at national scale. Scriptural sources including the Bhagavad-Gītā (3.10; 17.20), Manusmṛti (4.227), and Ṛgveda (10.117) provide the ethical scaffolding for non-transactional, cheerful, fitness-sensitive giving. This paper synthesizes public materials from the VHP and policy statements from India’s IKS Division (MoE/AICTE) to situate contemporary practice, and engage recent scholarship that revisits Agrasen’s principle for modern development aims. This paper concludes with a practical A-G-R-A-S-E-N framework for designing local pooling ecosystems, and proposes evaluation metrics that honour both human dignity and accountability. (Ministry of Education)