Revisioning Auroville’s economy

The ideal vision of the Auroville economy is partly based upon Mother’s The Dream where she mentions, among other things, that in an ideal society, “Money would no longer be the sovereign lord”. Further, “Work would not be there as the means of gaining one’s livelihood, it would be the means whereby to express oneself, develop one’s capacities and possibilities, while doing at the same time service to the whole group, which on its side would provide for each one’s subsistence and for the field of his work.”

However, many Aurovilians are concerned think that our economy is moving away from this ideal towards a more money-based system. In a recent Auronet survey, 64% agreed that the role of money is becoming too dominant in today’s Auroville and felt that steps need to be taken to reverse this trend. Another 26% felt this perception was somewhat true.

What is this based upon? One obvious example is that while Mother did not want cash exchange within Auroville, cash exchanges happen frequently for goods or services rendered, either through the physical exchange of money, or through transfers between individual accounts held at Auroville’s Financial Service, which operate practically as personal savings accounts.

As one of the participants in the discussion put it, we have evolved from a society where most essential services were free, to one where the majority have to be paid for; from one where there was a great deal of collective sharing to one where many people feel they have to look after themselves. From one of informal exchange and barter, to one where many things have a price tag and where it is difficult to live without fairly generous financial resources.

In fact, as another participant noted, our present economic system breeds a feeling of want and a preoccupation with money. “Not that it wouldn’t have happened anyway, because this is happening in the rest of India, but we have made choices which have clearly accelerated it.”

How did this happen?

Jocelyn remembers the early days. “In those days we never sold a single thing. Everything was exchanged or given away and there was a strong spirit of togetherness, community. Whatever we earned in the commercial units we gave to the community because it was Auroville’s money.”

She remembers that a major shift happened when the community ran short of money and there wasn’t enough for everyone. “This was the beginning of people having individual accounts at Pour Tous (later called Financial Service). It developed into a movement where people started saying, ‘She is not working half as much as I am, so I should get more’. Then what people received, which we term ‘maintenance’, became attached to a specific work, and we started getting what feels more like a salary.”

Around the same time, remembers another participant, there was a strong push from the Economy Group to make the community services financially self-sufficient through charging Aurovilians for any work done.

“It was a big blow to the services when the Economy Group said providing services free of cost does not work. However, this mentality, which keeps chipping away at the ideal, had actually been there for a very long time.”

One of the participants notes that Auroville has become a kind of ‘California in Tamil Nadu’, with its upmarket boutiques and expensive eateries. “Many of those who have lived here for years cannot afford to purchase these goods or even to eat in our restaurants,” she notes. “This is a recipe for social tensions and encourages a preoccupation with money”.

These tensions and inequalities are exacerbated, says another, by the present system where commercial unit managers are able to pay themselves far more than people in the services receive. “Their argument is, you see how hard we are working, we are making a lot of money for Auroville, so we deserve more remuneration than those who are just working in services. Somehow, the people who are making money seem to feel this is something more ‘real’, more valuable, to the community than ‘merely’ providing a service.”

“There is much less sense of connection, of collective responsibility today,” notes another.”We all have our individual accounts which are treated as private property to use as we like. If we have financial means and pay a fixed monthly contribution – which doesn’t at all reflect the true cost of providing the services and benefits of living here – we can live very comfortably and not be involved in any work for the community.”

However, Isha sees what is happening as an aspect of human nature. “I see that in each individual, and all of us, there are cross-currents and different motivations. One will always be to take care of one’s personal needs; another is to participate in the collective, and to give to strengthen the collective. These things coexist but the balance between the two is always shifting. In Auroville, the trend seems to me that more and more the focus is on the individual, rather than the collective or the larger view.”

Experiments have been made, and are being made, to reverse this trend, but often they have to overcome considerable opposition. Anandi, one of the managers of the Pour Tous Distribution Centre (PTDC), remembers how difficult it was to get it off the ground. “When we wanted to start PTDC and requested some financial support from the community, one of the people in the Economy Group told me ‘I don’t want this responsibility. What if somebody starts taking things and you go into minus?’ We are constantly frightened by anything new, unconventional. We were frightened by the PTDC experiment, by the Varuna free electricity experiment, in the early days we were frightened by the Free Store, because we always assume that people will take advantage.

“There will always be a few cases but that doesn’t mean we mustn’t try experiments. Why should we lower our ideals because not everyone agrees or is interested?”

Re-visioning

So what do they think can be done to align the Auroville economy more closely with the original vision?

This was already discussed during the Auroville Retreat in the group focussing upon the economy. One result was the formation of a sub-group to look into how to increase the in-kind aspect of our economy – provisions and services without a cash component – as one step in the ‘de-monetizing’ of Auroville. One proposal was to begin by looking at those older people who have lived longest in Auroville and see if some kind of universal maintenance or ‘prosperity’ package, taking care of basic needs without cash exchange, could be provided for them.

The intention behind this is not simply to provide services rather than money but also to build trust among Aurovilians that the community will support them. “This is very much missing at present and one of the reasons why many people feel they have to look after themselves.”

This proposal could be a first step towards a more radical solution – the provision of a comprehensive prosperity package to all those who have fully committed themselves to serving the community. The package would not be the same for everyone, there would be an element of individual choice reflecting the different needs of different individuals, but ideally the basics – food, healthcare, transport, shelter, education – would be provided according to need.

This would mean that what Auroville would give us in return for work or another form of involvement would be provided by centrally-supported services.

Well-functioning services are a crucial element in the re-visioning of our economy. The services can bring a different quality into our lives. “If you go into Santé Multi-Purpose Health Clinic,” says one of the participants, “you immediately feel you are somewhere special; somewhere beautiful where you will be cared for in a spirit of service. In this way, our services can provide much more than the material aspect. They can provide an environment in which we can grow, develop, as was intended. And as more and more of them succeed in doing this, they will be like stepping-stones in the community that will allow us to move from one to another while remaining within the same very special atmosphere.”

At the same time, points out someone, we need to acknowledge that more can be done. There is a lack of a self and peer-assessment system in the services, and this needs to be put in place if we want a better community culture and atmosphere.

Another idea to put our economy on a new basis is to eliminate physical cash exchanges in the central city area. “There is a lot of opposition to this,” observes one of the participants, “as some people would love to have a supermarket and shops in the centre of the city where they can go and pay for things. But the planning office and the FAMC have restated support to protect a unique Auroville (no-cash) atmosphere in this area.”

This is seen as a fundamental stand that needs to be taken. But it was also agreed that interested individuals can sign up for a number of smaller economic experiments. In fact, a number of experiments have already been tried where participants pool their resources while attempting to collectively fulfil the basic needs of the participants. Some have failed, some, like the ‘Seed’ account (one of the ‘Circles’ experiments) or the ‘Prosperity’ account, have been more successful and are still running. The keys to success in such ventures seem to be conscious and responsible participation, a high level of trust between the participants, a precise accounting and monitoring programme and, crucially, a very capable individual or group willing to hold and supervise the experiment.

Anandi is ready for something more radical. “Let’s make an experiment that a group of us decide to live for some time without using any rupees in our life in Auroville, relying only upon what Auroville can provide, and see what happens.”

It was noted that the major thing we have to change in our economy today is what is considered ‘normal’. Today, what is considered normal is that people buy and sell things (through our News and Notes, for example) and that people’s value to the community is often assessed in terms of what they generate in rupees.

“It’s often about small daily choices,” says Isha, “recognising when something ‘negative’ is happening and deciding not to go that way. We don’t have to enable access to everything within Auroville itself.”

How will it be paid for?

But a question remains. Many of these experiments, particularly the comprehensive prosperity packages, will cost money. At present, City Services covers the basic budgets of our services but cannot provide funds for the development of the services or for setting up new ones. Meanwhile, we hear frequent reports that the Auroville economy is in trouble. So how will they be paid for?

There are a number of options. Nicole, who is on the Budget Coordination Committee, suggests we should require non-participating residents to pay at the very least the true cost of what is provided to them by the community. She points out that at least Rs 10,000/- a month per person is the monetary value of what we all enjoy here, if we consider what is being supported and created both by our central economy and by Aurovilians personally. Mother, Nicole clarifies, saw three ways in which Aurovilians would contribute, “work, kind or money”. Shouldn’t residents who do not work for the collective contribute very meaningfully in money? Shouldn’t Rs 10,000-/ be also the minimum monthly contribution from commercial unit holders to City Services, rather than the Rs 3,150 they are asked for at present, if running a unit is their only contribution to Auroville? At present, she says, we see a mushrooming of new units and activities that contribute very little to the collective economy. Moreover, the contribution of units should be based upon turnover and not, as at present, on profit.

Social media and crowd-funding are also options to raise capital for projects vetted by the BCC, FAMC or Board of Services.

Manohar, like several others in the community, makes a more radical proposal. He suggests that, after deducting all possible legitimate and documented expenses for running an Auroville commercial unit, the totality of its net income should go to Auroville, not merely one third or less as is happening at present. “In this way, the community would have more funds available for a general increase in service maintenances and for the many other needs for which we constantly have to fundraise.” In fact, this was agreed to at the time the Unity Fund (Auroville’s financial umbrella) was created but it has never been acted upon.

Jocelyn concurs with this suggestion. “I don’t see any reason why everything should not go into the common pot and get re-distributed according to needs. When we started the first Auroville commercial unit, Aurocreation, we gave everything we earned to the community because it was Auroville’s money. When we needed money we asked for it, and we always got it. This is what happens in the Ashram and I think that is how Mother wanted our units to function – give everything and you will be provided for. And it worked.”

Nobody has any illusions that changing the way our present economy functions will be easy. Certain attitudes and assumptions about what works – or doesn’t work – have become deeply embedded over the years. Some of the solutions mentioned here may be questionable and based on assumptions about the willingness of the community to change. Generalizations, for example that commercial unit holders are primarily interested in enriching themselves rather than in contributing to the collectivity, are also clearly unhelpful in creating a unified approach to re-visioning our economy.

The key, as one of the participants put it, is attitudinal change. “We have to have the consciousness that we are all working for the same goal, even if it is in different ways. If we all came here knowing that everything we did would be service, that all we are asked to do is to give, it would be a different place.”

“Somewhere we have to ground Her dream on this planet,” says another. “We have to ground Her truth somewhere, even if there are only a hundred of us doing it. We should not just be accommodating all these different tendencies in human nature.”

“What Auroville can uniquely give us, what we can give each other,” concludes Nicole, “is this sense of having the needs that enable our inner growth met and catered for with a psychic attitude. Mother gave a model of a society for Auroville that is based on work and services and specifically not on commercial exchanges between Aurovilians. We are probably the only place on earth where this is given to us as the way forward and, as She says, it is an experiment. We must give ourselves the means to come closer to it.”

Are we suffering from relative poverty as a community?

From the time of Auroville’s humble beginnings, the common value system has supported a simple but rich and beautiful way of life. A life that is not too dependent on financial resources, but fosters enjoying abundance and prosperity in things are readily available and from a rich social support system.

Over time, in order to become financially independent and to meet our basic needs, activities in Auroville began to produce products that were unique and beautiful. These products soon found a market internationally and locally in high-end exclusive shops. Eateries sprung up catering to high-income tourists. Therapies, workshops and training programmes got developed to cater to the high-income seekers. It is interesting to note that all this happened with a very innocent motive to make a living for community members and to contribute to the collective.

Over the years, the indirect consequence of this development is that now the basic maintenance and ability to afford Auroville’s products, eateries and therapies are completely out of synch. The maintenance system, for various reasons, just about supports a basic lifestyle, thus making our own produce simply unaffordable to most of the community members who rely on the maintenance system. In a more humble setting, one would feel privileged to receive the maintenance. However, Auroville is not a humble setting anymore. Moreover, today, only some of us have easier access to the expensive food at Auroville restaurants and items in our boutiques.

Being on the modest maintenance and being surrounded by offerings for the rich and privileged makes us feel poorer than we are. Consequently, a large number of community members are engaged in activities just to make ends meet and some of them work outside to be able to achieve that. We are losing all this human resource to deal with basic needs rather than work to manifest the Auroville Charter and work on Human Evolution. This was the last thing Mother would have wanted for us. In fact, the Mother wanted to create a place where one is free from this in order to explore the higher dimensions of humanity.

I believe catering to the rich and wealthy in our bid to bring money into Auroville has worked against us and makes a number of the community members feel deprived and financially poor.

I suggest we encourage more activities that cater to the needs of community members at affordable prices in line with the maintenance system.

The units could reflect on their strategy and innovate on how to address this. The units catering to the rich could offer deep discounts for their products and develop affordable product ranges exclusively for the community members. I am sure there are whole numbers of things we can do if we put our mind to it.

It will be wonderful if the newly formed FAMC focused on such vision-related issues that are critical to our growth.

Min (first posted on Auronet)