Universal Basic Income and Auroville

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a model for providing all citizens with a guaranteed cash allocation, regardless of their income, resources or employment status. The idea has been around for a long time but it has received renewed attention in the past 20 years because its proponents believe it can ameliorate the effects, which are being experienced in many nations, of poverty, growing inequality and the prospect of unemployment due to increased automation. 

Several countries, including Canada, Finland and Namibia, have carried out local or regional experiments with basic income or related welfare systems. In India, the Economic Survey of 2016-17 stated that “A just society needs to guarantee to each individual a minimum income which they can count on, and which provides the necessary material foundation for a life with access to basic goods and a life of dignity”, and before the recent General Election Rahul Gandhi’s Congress Party promised, if elected, a basic income to 250 million of the country’s poorest citizens. It would have amounted to Rs 12,000 a month for each family. 

Some Aurovilians have also become interested in the concept, and in August six of them attended the 19th World Basic Income Congress in Hyderabad, where Suryamayi, who was one of them, presented on Auroville. Here she explains the concept of UBI and its relevance to and possible application in Auroville. 

How did you get interested in UBI?

As I am doing a Ph.D. on Auroville, I have had to look into the research that has already been done on this place. I became very inspired about the potential for research here, given the multiplicity of experimental practices, but was surprised how little of it has actually been done and transmitted beyond Auroville, and how little we are aware of similar experimentation that is being done elsewhere which may be of relevance to us. I thought there was a gap to be bridged; that we could learn something from exchanging about progressive practices with others around the world.

This was the reasoning behind The Bridge, a conference I co-organised for the 50th anniversary, which brought together Aurovilians and outside researchers and experimenters working in similar fields. Before the conference I asked Aurovilians what they thought some of our main challenges were and if they knew of inspiring things happening elsewhere that dealt with similar challenges. A few people mentioned basic income as a movement worth exploring in relation to Auroville. 

Meanwhile, I had read Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income (a book by Rutger Bregman) as part of my PhD, and had been struck by the account of how UBI resulted in individuals pursuing more meaningful work, which I found to be in resonance with the founding conceptions of work in Auroville, of taking up work as a yoga, which, of course, is ‘meaningful’ in an additional, deeper dimension. 

We invited Sarath Davala, who is the president of the India Network for Basic Income, to participate in The Bridge, and make a presentation on basic income. This led to further interest and links being developed between us, and in August he invited me to present on Auroville for the basic income community at the 19th World Basic Income Congress in Hyderabad, and extended an invitation to attend to any Aurovilian interested in learning more about basic income. I was surprised to discover that one of the people who came had actually proposed a basic income policy for Auroville when she was in the FAMC so, clearly, the idea has been around for some time. 

 How can UBI support this deeper relationship to work?

If you are financially constrained, this might play a role in approaching work as yoga: you may not engage in work that you feel called to do, but instead choose work that secures you a certain income. 

Do you also think that UBI has the capacity to lessen inequalities in Auroville?

I don’t think UBI achieves equality in any society. However, The Mother says that everybody’s basic needs should be met in Auroville and I think it can help achieve this, given our economic context. 

The Mother said she didn’t want there to be an exchange of money in Auroville, so we have tried to meet the basic needs of individuals through the provision of services rather than cash. UBI is normally cash-based so do you see that as a challenge to introducing it here?

When I invited Sarath to The Bridge I wasn’t thinking about introducing UBI in Auroville because I thought it was a very different approach: what we have been developing here is essentially a UBS, Universal Basic Services, model. I do think we should continue to develop this as it works to delink money from the provision of basic needs, and it creates a collective responsibility for the wellbeing of individuals. 

In fact, when I presented Auroville at the 19th World Basic Income Congress I was asked to critique UBI from the perspective of Auroville. Among the things I pointed out are that with UBI you still have to do all this financial decision-making to ensure your economic well-being, whereas many Aurovilians don’t have to be so involved in this kind of calculation because of the services provided here. I also pointed out that one has to consider the economic context in which UBI is introduced: the effectiveness will be very different in a capitalist society with high profit margins on basic needs and very few publicly funded services, as compared to a socialist economy. But somebody on my panel, a professor at Oxford, asked: why do we keep pitching Universal Basic Services against Universal Basic Income? Why can’t we have both? 

It’s a good point because I think UBI could be useful in the present Auroville context as what is being provided currently through the services does not cover all basic needs and is not enough of a cushion for people to give up or change their work. 

So you would see UBI as a supplement to our present services?

Yes, I wouldn’t at all see it as replacing them. 

If the UBI component is cash, are we not continuing to support a capitalist element in our economy? 

This is an overarching criticism of UBI, given that it is a policy that is by and large supported by people who wish to see a systemic change away from a capitalist economy: it uses money, which is a tool of capitalism. 

That’s why I think concentrating on providing Universal Basic Services in Auroville is much more interesting because that is actually providing an alternative model of socio-economic organisation. 

My specific concern with UBI in the Auroville context is that it would be incongruent with the ideal of no exchange of money. At the Congress, I raised this issue, and discovered that according to the Basic Income Earth Network’s definition of UBI, it could consist of cash or another medium of exchange, which means that it can be in the form of ‘kind’ or an Auroville currency. But UBI cannot be allocated for a specific usage, which is what happens now with ‘in-kind’ contributions in our Maintenances, for the lunch scheme, for example. A core component of a basic income is that people have the freedom to decide how to utilise it.

However, at a recent Auroville workshop on the topic, one group was discussing whether to decrease the ‘kind’ component and increase the cash component of our present Maintenances, which seems to suggest that they feel the kind component limits their freedom to access what they need. 

If you have people who are really financially stressed and they are compelled to purchase products which are more expensive in Auroville than in Pondicherry, or they are in need of products or services that are not available in Auroville, and do not have enough cash to afford these, they will feel constrained. Interestingly, the outcome of the discussion was a proposal to extend bulk purchasing (outside of the community) for collective provisioning purposes, so that we can get more products distributed in Auroville at a cheaper price – like Nandini does for clothing. 

At the same time, if they are getting more choices that can be purchased in Auroville with the kind portion of their Maintenance, the cash portion will represent more: because they will not be spending that in Auroville, they will be able to keep it for purchases outside. So even without making the UBI in cash I think it will increase the purchasing power of their cash portion.

One of the common objections to giving people a guaranteed basic income is that they would work less or spend it wastefully. What does the experience of UBI pilot projects around the world suggest concerning this reservation?

The pilots show that people don’t work less, they even work more. But people confuse universal basic income with a minimum wage. A UBI is much less than a minimum wage (although proponents hope it will one day at least represent a living wage), so it probably wouldn’t cause people to stop working, or even to work less.  The research shows that people who receive a UBI do not waste their money or spend it on things that destroy them or society - the most common assumption, especially when it comes to the poor. On the contrary, they often use it to improve education opportunities for their children, or to start small enterprises which will make them more prosperous.  It’s been seen in pilot studies that UBI actually encourages entrepreneurship, because people have a little bit of a cushion to fall back on, so they are more willing to take risks. 

By the way, I think there’s a difference regarding receiving a Universal Basic Income and receiving social services in the way these are administered in many societies. Regarding the latter, recipients often try to get as many benefits as they can yet they often won’t work more because if they do so they may lose those benefits and be financially worse off as a result - this is what’s referred to as the ‘poverty trap’. UBI avoids that trap because it is not means-tested, and creates a very different psychological response because everybody is getting it, not only those who are considered ‘poor’. 

Another objection to UBI is why give it to the rich? Why not focus the financial help upon the poor, the people who are really in need?

The proponents of UBI insist it should be for everyone as a matter of principle. I’m not yet convinced by that. In Auroville I think it is worth asking this question because A Dream says that the community should provide only for people’s basic needs and some people can clearly provide for these already. But some of the Auroville colleagues who came with me to the Basic Income World Congress said that if the richer people in Auroville also received it, maybe they would give it to projects that the communal budget currently doesn’t cover, and this would be a good indication of what people in the community want to support.

At what level would you pitch an Auroville UBI?

Among the Aurovilians who came to the Congress were members of the Budget Coordination Committee. They suggested a figure on the basis of the newly introduced “care package”, which is calculated to meet an individual’s subsistence needs. This is worth about Rs 4,000 a month. 

How would this be paid for?

First of all I think we would have to be clear about what we are seeking to address in the Auroville context. Is it people who feel stuck in their current work and don’t feel free enough to move, because they would lose their Maintenance? Or people with a Maintenance, but who still don’t have enough to meet their needs? If so, how many does that represent? We would need to do a pilot project to explore this. We hope to have a proposal for a pilot ready by the end of the year.

In terms of funding, in Germany private citizens were invited to commit a monthly amount to the German pilot project, which has been on-going for several years now. If we did a UBI pilot in Auroville, it could be interesting to fund it in a similar way because this would show if as a community we are interested enough in the project to invest in it, as well as address the tensions around wealth inequality that exist within this community. 

If the results of the pilot were positive and you decided to implement UBI, have you thought about how it could be funded long-term?

It would depend on the scope of what we want to implement based on the results of the pilot. So if, for example, it was to introduce a UBI in addition to Maintenances for the people who feel they need it, and we find that this comprises only a small percentage of our population, then it’s a relatively small amount to fund. If we go for something much bigger - for example, allocating Maintenances to all Aurovilians de-linked from specific work - we might find that financially it is not possible. But I think you can always tailor some version to what’s financially viable. 

Basically, for some form of UBI to gain traction in Auroville what seems to be required is a major psychological shift away from assessing and measuring work, and Aurovilians’ individual commitment, in terms of hours and its direct contribution to the community coffers. 

Absolutely, this is why people have all these knee-jerk reactions to UBI, like people won’t work anymore’. It requires a completely different idea of what it means to be in community and how we participate. In this context, I think it’s important to remember that we are already embodying an alternative in this regard. But we also know there are problems with our present ‘system’. Specifically, many people are dissatisfied with the way Maintenances are designed and administered, and I think UBI could help us move beyond this.

So are you optimistic about the future of UBI in Auroville?

People may be right when they say we can’t assume that what has worked in pilot projects in Finland and elsewhere will work here. But we are not looking at simply applying something that has been done elsewhere without considering the ideals and realities of the Auroville context, and designing it accordingly. Actually, my sense is that some form of UBI could work better here than anywhere else because this is an intentional community and most people are here because they really want to create something new together.