Conscious food choices at Pour Tous Distribution Centre (PTDC)

Members of Pour Tous Distribution Centre (PTDC), the Auroville community’s food cooperative, have recently been given a new way to monitor their consumption and develop more sustainable patterns. The Consciously project, created by Talam (the Auroville-based software development unit that manages Aurostat), has been analysing PTDC data to create graphical representations of the trends in consumption over the past five years and to develop a community response for a more sustainable lifestyle.

Divish Gupta, a Talam volunteer, explains, “The goal of Aurostat is to develop indicators which measure Auroville’s progress and wellbeing as a community. And we thought that one major aspect of this was sustainability, especially regarding food.” Divish first came to Auroville in October 2017 and was struck by the experience of visiting PTDC. When he returned a year ago to join Talam, his earlier inspiration found practical application. He was later joined in the project by Shubham Bansal, Kanika Agarwal, who are also specialised in computer science and data analytics, and Garvit Sahdev, who has a background in business management. They reached out to PTDC as well as to the Farm Group to find ways in which they could tackle the question of food sustainability.

Anandi, the manager of PTDC, has warmly welcomed the Consciously project because “PTDC is not here for commerce; we are here to do something different, and so it made sense.” She elaborates further, saying, “When I go to bed at night, I think of all the plastic waste that we are creating as distributors. So when they came with this initiative, I could see the potential.”

On 12 March, Anandi, Kanika, and Shubham gave a presentation called “Data-driven insights on our progress towards conscious consumption” to the PTDC community where they presented statistical analysis and data visualisations of the total consumption at PTDC. The event also served as an important opportunity to present PTDC’s history and model. Anandi explains that this was necessary to remind people that the central concept of PTDC is meeting basic needs collectively through individuals contributing toward the cooperative purchasing of goods.”We started 13 years ago with 156 members and now we have 1,510 members. We’ve had incredible growth, but we have to keep repeating the reasons behind PTDC because people forget.”

Introducing the Consciously platform

In April, the Consciously team launched consciously.auroville.org.in, which combines a personal dashboard and a discussion forum. Through the dashboard, users get individualised tracking of their consumption of products from PTDC, broken down to show the percentages of local Auroville products, organic goods, and the products that result in plastic waste. Using the Apache Superset web application, this data is visualised as graphs and charts that allow users to observe their progress toward more sustainable consumption and identify their weak spots.

To complement this data and enable users to change their patterns of consumption, the platform also has a discussion forum where members of the community can share their goals and ideas with each other to progress toward more sustainable consumption patterns. With an attractive user interface powered by the open-source Discourse software, the forum is divided into the categories of Goal Board, Questions & Challenges, Idea Box, and Offerings.

The Consciously team has opened the platform for the first trial users, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “When we launched it, we thought we would get maybe fifty people, but within two days we had seventy to eighty sign ups,” Divish says.

This pilot group is particularly pivotal because new discussion forums can be plagued by inertia, when active users are few in number. An earlier attempt in 2018 to create an Auroville-wide Discourse discussion forum never took off as few people made the leap from the community’s existing intranet, Auronet. “It takes time,” Divish explains. “Users are not going to post a question when they are not seeing other people posting questions.”

Consequently, the Consciously team is actively supporting the pilot users to help the forum obtain the vibrancy it needs to be self-sufficient. Divish says, “In the next fifteen days, we are meeting with the Consciously users one-on- one to see the kinds of questions and ideas they have. Then we want to follow up with them so that they post their questions, and we want to follow up with the people who have answers, so that they post answers. Maybe after two weeks, after there is enough buzz on the platform, we can open it for all.”

Garvit recalls, “When we showed people their dashboard, they saw the quantity of plastic waste they are generating and non-organic products they are consuming. But somewhere they are stuck. Either on the alternatives side by having no sustainable alternatives, or on the usage side when they don’t know how to use the alternatives, such as cooking with local vegetables. So the point is to bring the community together to solve each other’s challenges.”

Next steps toward sustainability

With the Consciously platform now live, the Consciously team continues to reach out to stakeholders in Auroville and to build a product list of what is available locally. When meeting with Auroville farmers and other local food suppliers, the team wants to promote the platform as a space for dialogue between suppliers and end users.

As an example, Divish mentions, “When meeting a farmer yesterday, we learned that what they are producing is still driven by what people want to eat. Because people want tomatoes, they have to grow tomatoes, even though they are tough to grow here.” The Consciously team therefore wants to amplify the voices of these farmers as they try to educate their end users about more sustainable options.

PTDC is also broadening the availability of bulk goods and products free of plastic packaging at an impressive rate. It is increasing the number of barrels for rice, grains, and pulses. Initial steps have already been taken to see how to provide toiletries and commercial biscuits in bulk as well. “There has been a lot of support from the community for the change to bulk distribution,” says Anandi.

Next on PTDC’s agenda is getting an additional electricity supply to allow for a refrigerated drinks dispenser. This will reduce the dependency on plastic bottles. “Our objective is to have no single-use packaging at all, or at least only paper,” says Anandi.

With the Consciously dashboard in place, the shift to more sustainable patterns, both for individuals and the collective, will be more easy to track. “Showing people their dashboard of consumption at PTDC is a starting point, but it can’t be scaled up to include every shop in Auroville,” says Garvit. “In the long term, it is about creating constant awareness, so that even if a person picks up something in plastic packaging from another shop they will still be aware of the impact.”

“We have a long way to go still,” Anandi concurs, “but I think that in general our users are becoming more sustainable in their own right. And it’s very nice to see people coming up with their own initiatives, too.”