Facts & figures on the Aurovilian Utopia

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 township in the making – belonging to noone in particular but humanity as a whole – was a long standing one. It came to The Mother in the 1930s but it wasn’t until 1966 that the Indian Government gave its backing and UNESCO passed a unanimous resolution commending it as a project of importance to the future of humanity.
• The town is just outside of Puducherry (earlier called Pondicherry), a former French colony now Union Territory and some 160 km south of Madras (previously Chennai). But most of Auroville belongs to Tamil Nadu.
• Auroville was thought out to accommodate up to 50,000 people but right now there is some 2,200 Aurovilians in over 90 independent communities scattered over the entire area.
• Auroville has nationals from 46 countries, most notably from France, Netherlands and Germany. Interestingly, there is no African nationalities, neither is there any Chinese or Japanese.
• Some 40% of the population is Indian in the meantime, a fact that concerns some and delights others. Most of these are villagers from the villages surrounding Auroville, only a smaller portion comes from other areas of India to the township. Many of the Indians attracted to Auroville are from lower castes based on principals such as living in harmony above and beyond castes. However, it usually takes at least up to the 2nd generation for these families to be fully integrated.
• At the same time, 4-5,000 villagers from outside and inside Auroville are working here every single day.
• Three villages are located WITHIN Auroville’s green belt and belong to Auroville property. This isn’t always easy for either party but on the bright side it leads to serious attempts to live with each other in harmony and grow beyond ego and cultural differences.
• Auroville Foundation is active in a number of ways to improve the lifes of the villagers around them. It boosts a variety of special projects in education, forestation, tailoring, gardening, dental prevention and other health care projects.
• Auroville Village Action Groups (AVAG) liaises with villagers. They also work with over 250 women self help groups (SHG’s) and have given micro credits to over 50,000 villagers (only 800 of them are men, for very good reasons).
• Some 40% of Auroville’s income is derived from it’s commercial units that sell products like the windmills, food, clothes or consult on the various topics in which they gathered an impressive expertise.
• An Aurovilian who works full-time (35 hrs/week) INSIDE of Auroville, receives a so called maintanance of 6,800 rupees per month, plus free lunches at Solar Kitchen (worth some 1,000 rs) and health benefits. All up, a package of some 10,000 rupees. Other rates can be applied but noone is to be paid more than 3-times the basic maintenance.
• The maintenance does not apply if you work outside of Auroville, at least not if it’s not an Auroville project. This can cause some serious distraught for social workers engaged in village development projects of long standing but not officially started by Auroville.
• Aurovilians with savings are not receiving any maintanance either.
• Also interesting: if you choose not to work at all and you’re healthy, work is available, etc – you’ll have to pay the same amount to the communal funds, which people receive as a basic maintenance!
• There is no private property. This applies to residencies that people live in as well as businesses, which they run. If you built a house within Auroville, your right to live there usually gets respected for your and your children, unless you leave Auroville for longer than 5 years.
• Also, each Aurovilian business is supposed to contribute at least 33% of their profits for communal services. We were told however, that’s not always been adhered to.
• Only 6% of funding for Auroville comes from the Indian government in comparison to 15% of the income being contributed by Aurovilians themselves, guests and friends of Auroville.

In general, we learnt that The Mother didn’t believe in prescribing rules or regulations, simply because we don’t yet know any other way of governing a place like this. Her preference was to convince and make the recommendations appealing, understood, sensible rather than reinforcing them. This, of course, may and does result in anything from very wide interpretations of recommendations to plain abuse.

Want to know more? Check out Auroville in a nutshell or the personal Notes on my intro to Auroville