What is the Master Plan?

One of the disagreements concerns The Mother’s approval of the Master Plan. Some people, including the Secretary, believe that Mother’s vision for Auroville is laid down in the Master Plan – one person even stated that she had approved it. However, it was pointed out that the first draft of the Master Plan came after Mother’s passing, so she couldn’t possibly have done this. Mother had only ‘blessed’ the Galaxy model of the Auroville township.

The Master Plan is something different. As an Aurovilian planner/architect explained, “It’s a first framework and practical approach towards a possible realization on the ground. It needs to be followed by a detailed development plan. The Master Plan is only a policy protocol, a prospectus or a vision, and is not an implementation plan. It’s a precursor to a plan – it’s not a document to build roads.” It was also observed that, “Apart from specifying the four zones, it (the Master Plan) does not give any detailed proposals for the development of the city area. The detailed planning was envisaged as an ongoing process.” In fact, our latest Master Plan specifies that it should be revisited every five years to assess the progress and relevance of development plans and projects.

Another area of disagreement concerns the legality of the Master Plan. One Aurovilian stated that it is a ‘myth’ that the Auroville Township Master Plan is not binding on the Foundation and its residents, as it was approved by the HRD Ministry in 2001 and notified in the Government of India Gazette in 2010. In fact, the TDC states that their work “is based on the community approved Master Plan of 1999, which was subsequently gazetted by Government of India in 2010.”

But, as a community member pointed out in a General Meeting, this is incorrect. The Master Plan that was gazetted was not the document approved by the community in 1999. In fact, the community-approved Master Plan of 1999 was further worked on by a small group and became “The Auroville Universal Township Master Plan (Perspective 2025)”. It was this plan, which never received community endorsement, which was approved by the Ministry of Human Resource Development on 12th April, 2001 and subsequently gazetted by the Auroville Foundation.

In fact, one Aurovilian pointed out that “the Tamil Nadu Government – which is responsible for all land matters in the state – had refused to endorse this Master Plan because it did not take the villages into account”.

What, exactly, was the intention behind the document the community endorsed in 1999? Somebody involved in the drafting of that Master Plan reminded us that the document was aimed more at protection of the Green Belt from speculators, and does not give any detailed proposals for the development of the City Area. As the notes of that meeting put it, “The more detailed planning will be an ongoing progress with all interested wholeheartedly encouraged to participate”.

And, he continued, “It was under these clear specifications that various stakeholders from within the community felt secure enough to formally approve the Master Plan, which likely would have been rejected otherwise. Whoever uses ‘community approved’ as an argument or validation for specific developments of the City needs to understand the spirit and the actual conditions with which the Master Plan was accepted.”

The issue of how we are planning the city and, specifically, the Crown, was also debated. An Aurovilian pointed out that our present TDC is under-staffed because the TDC constituted by the Residents’ Assembly in 2017 collapsed on its own and had never been fully replaced. “This is the situation where the Secretary has stepped in” [by making temporary replacements into full members of the team eds].

The TDC constituted by the residents in 2017 consisted of an “interface team” to liaise between the residents and the permanent technical staff, but the team never succeeded in fulfilling this function.

An architect with an interest in town planning pointed out that, “There is a widespread aversion – if not resistance – to planning in Auroville. We have neither been able to establish a structure nor a fair and accepted process for town planning through which our ideas and ideals could be brought closer to realisation in a cooperative manner.”

He noted that 47 people had been members of L’Avenir/TDC since 2008, reflecting attempts to balance or include different approaches to planning the town, as well as short fixed terms for membership, and observed, “Planning needs continuity How can anybody be expected to do and complete a far reaching complicated project when the team is ever changing, dictated by “terms”?

An Aurovilian town planner expressed his professional concern. “I have been living in Auroville for 18 years and I am still trying to understand the logic of the planning of the Crown and other roads.” He emphasized that planning has many elements to it – economic, social, institutional, physical, ecological, and in Auroville, spiritual.

“All these should be considered, but they are not. In the absence of a mobility plan, a water management plan, an ecological plan and other necessary plans, it is impossible to say that we need the Crown and promote it.”

In this connection it was mentioned that The Mother had written a letter to the Ford Foundation in 1969. Mother was asking the Foundation to do a functional analysis on what systems needed to be designed to create a structured planning process, a work that takes many years. “This letter is the clearest indication of The Mother’s intentions on planning and building the city,” pointed out another Aurovilian. “A lot of us have an idea of town planning as making sketches on a piece of paper: you draw roads and where buildings come up. But that’s not what town planning is. That’s rather the end of town planning. There is a lot which precedes this, and that’s exactly what has not been done.

" A rather different perspective upon planning was offered by an Aurovilian who opposed ‘mental, top-down planning’ to ‘spiritual planning’, a plan which ‘births through the spirit, a download of the Truth in form, the formless flowing as the form… It is the second kind of planning She was downloading as the Master Plan. It is truly the “Master” of all the plans.”

But why the present rush to manifest it? asked another, pointing out that Auroville is, first of all, “a laboratory of evolution for a new form of organization”, and that that the city should come second – not the other way round