The glass half full

With our beloved cycles and Ortlieb bags, which we still use almost every day    Dear all,  We will close our betterplace fundraising event “12,000 km on cycles for adequacy in rural India” in support of the glass half full in the next few days as it has fully and successfully mobilised the support we were hoping for.  With your out...

We are delighted to introduce our new partner for collecting contributions made in Germany. Please welcome Dominik Schmengler , Founder of department of tomorrow and the association For Fair Education . With this change, all donations made from Germany and India are again fully tax-deductible. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank...

After  having spent some 3 weeks in Auroville to research local best practices in rural development, we figured that such a time span would not do any justice to what’s going on here. The density of approaches we believe we can learn valuable lessons from, is extremely high as Auroville as a whole is an experiment, a laboratory, a community of o...

Video 1: Salt and Blood This is a short movie by our dear friend Pankaj Trivedi from www.hornokplz.tv about the salt farmers in the Little Rann of Kutch (Gujarat), which Kalyan visited as part of our journey. It’s a heartbreaking story, their working and living conditions are nothing but pathetic. Despite all else we’ve seen, this is o...

I thought, one or the other might be interested in some facts and figures that I learnt about at the introduction on Saturday. For this, I have shared my notes as pdf document (see the notes on my Intro to Auroville) but for the lazy ones, here’s a summary of the ones I was willing to type up for you… The dream for this Utopian townsh...

… and humanity as a whole. What a vision!!! My day of arriving here was pure bliss. A hearty welcome by the staff of Verite was followed by a delicious breakfast and moving into my incredibly lofty hut on 4 granite pillars. After a good rest I settled in the guest lounge taking up my ‘virtual office’. Internet is not always worki...

Photo: labourers ‘signing’ for their days work with their finger print. We are back at Tekulodu, the location of ProtoVillage where we apply what we’ve learned during our journey. Right now, we’re brainstorming income generation opportunities with the villagers. There’s a whole list of rural enterprises, which can com...

Driving through Bangalore as we do often, one day we discovered to our astonishment that there was a Gandhi Institute for rural development and energy just ‘en route’. So, on May 24, we took the time to pay them a visit and were kindly welcomed even though the lady in charge had just locked her office to leave for the day. She told us...

In 3 months and across 4000km, we have had amazing opportunities to learn what, in the meantime, has significantly changed our perspectives towards development. The people we have met along our journey have collectively afforested over 100,000 hectares of wasteland and thus raised food security and income generation opportunities through agricult...

The Mumbai Suburban Railway system is an offshoot of the first railway built by the British in India in April 1853. It carries more than 6.9 million commuters on a daily basis, which means more than half of the total daily passenger capacity of the entire Indian Railways!! During peak hours, 550 people travel in a carriage built for just 200 (or 4...