Gandhi's Salt March
A 240-mile walk to the sea turns a tax on salt into a nationwide act of civil disobedience
Quick facts
- Route
- Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi, about 240 miles
- Duration
- 24 days, 12 March to 6 April 1930
- Arrests in the wider campaign
- More than 60,000
What happened
On 12 March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad with 78 followers on a march of roughly 240 miles to the coastal village of Dandi, to break Britain's legal monopoly on salt production by making salt from seawater himself. Crowds grew along the route as Gandhi spoke and led prayers at stops throughout the 24-day march. On reaching Dandi, he found that police had crushed the salt deposits on the beach into the mud, but on 6 April 1930 he bent down and picked up a lump of natural salt anyway, a deliberate act of lawbreaking. The gesture triggered mass civil disobedience against the salt laws across India, and more than 60,000 people were jailed in the campaign that followed, though the British government made no immediate major concessions.
Why it matters
The Salt March demonstrated that a simple, symbolic act of nonviolent lawbreaking could mobilize millions and draw sustained international press attention to colonial rule in a way that armed resistance had not, establishing the template for the independence movement's remaining campaigns through 1947.
How we know
The Sabarmati Ashram's own chronology of Gandhi's life, kept at the site the march began from, records the precise dates alongside independent academic accounts of the march's scale and effect.
Sources
- Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust. The Mahatma: Life Chronology · Primary source (author-declared)gandhiashramsabarmati.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- The Nonviolence Project, University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Pinch of Salt and One of the Largest Nonviolence Movements in India: The Salt March of 1930 · Reputable sourcethenonviolenceproject.wisc.edu · The domain "thenonviolenceproject.wisc.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Ancient India → · The march that turned civil disobedience into a mass movement