Giovanni Ermiglia

In his later years, a persistent illness lessened the rate of Ermiglia's activities, which were then left to several friends and collaborators. The work of ASSEFA, which at first was limited to farming Tamil Nadu and South-India, slowly spread through the country and expanded, encompassing other activities such as education, microgranting and improving the situation of women. In 2015, the NGO was providing services to around one million households living in 10,000 villages.

While in Piedmont, he spent time with local intellectuals and started dating Lalla Romano, a well known poet, who wrote several poems for him. These works were later collated in Poesie per Giovanni, a book published in 2007 which also included some previously unpublished texts.

Giovanni Ermiglia died in 2004 in his hometown of Sanremo. In his will he left his estate to the Livia Rubino e Giovanni Ermiglia foundation, established in order to continue his legacy.

Ermiglia's commitment to Sarva Seva Farms increased and he spent a lot of time in India up to the 1990s. In 1995, the Italian groups of Bhoodan supporters were unified in ASSEFA Italia, a national NGO which was officially recognised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2002. As well as ASSEFA, Ermiglia sometimes also represented Movimento Sviluppo e Pace in India.

In 1969, during a trip in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Ermiglia met Shri J. Loganathan and other activists of the Bhoodan Movement, which was a movement founded during the 1950s by Vinoba Bhave. The Bhoodan Movement aimed to better distribute land ownership through voluntary land donations. Vinoba walked across India for 14 years collecting 4,193,579 acres of land (around 1,700,000 hectares). Unfortunately, much of this land was dry and/or had been long abandoned, and its new users were very poor and unable to afford new crops, limiting the success of his mission.

Back in Liguria, Ermiglia left aside his forensic work to become a philosophy teacher. In the late 1960s, he took part in the debate on the role of monasticism in Western society. This followed the publication of Thomas Merton's essay The contemplative and the atheist where Ermiglia, from an atheist point of view, supported the idea that monks were not compromised with the most questionable aspects of Catholic church temporal power.

Giovanni Ermiglia (24 June 1905 – 14 January 2004) was a nonviolent Italian activist who founded non-profit organization O.N.G. ASSEFA.