The founder of Arya Samaj, Mahrishi Dayanand Saraswati had once called upon the countrymen to collect two crore signatures for cow protection. He hoped that the collection of the signatures in such a huge quantity would force the government to ban cow slaughter. But unfortunately two crore signatures could not be collected then. After that, many signature campaigns were conducted demanding ban on cow slaughter. The biggest record of such campaigns is the collection of two crore signatures by RSS swayamsevaks in 1952 on the call of the then RSS Sarsanghachalak Shri Guruji. But the Vishwa Mangal Gou Gram Yatra is going to break this record too and will set a new world record. As per the initial indications, the signatures being collected will be in at least nine digits.
The signature campaign is getting tremendous response all over the country. There is no lack of people signing the memorandum, rather the number of workers collecting the signatures is falling short. The success of this campaign can be gauged from the fact that there are some Vibhags where more than ten lakh signatures have been collected. Only in Surat Mahanagar of Gujarat over ten lakh signatures were collected. Similarly, in Mangalore Vibhag of Karnataka over ten lakh signatures were collected. If we talk about districts, normally more than three lakh signatures have been collected at district level. Over four lakh signatures were collected in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. In Dhule district of the State too, over three lakh signatures have been collected.
At the meeting in Rajkot, Shri Raghaveshwara Bharati Swamiji was handed over 12.65 lakh signatures collected from Rajkot city, Amareli and Jamnagar districts. A cow of ‘Geer’ breed was worshipped at this function. The unique attraction of this function was that a total of 492 goubhaktas donated blood at this function equal to the weight of this cow. A digital signature campaign has also been launched at the website of Vishwa Mangal Gou Gram Yatra (www.gougram.org) which too has received tremendous response.
