The land exchange debate

Anton

I am absolutely for land exchange to consolidate the city. In 1991 I came for Auroville only, not for a Navaville or Ecoville etc. Auroville needs its physical body intact so centre plots are life savers. Some extra Master Plan Greenbelt land is fine as second priority because it is was added to protect the nucleus.

My main exceptions for land exchange: Sri Ma as it is our only nearby beach, and a plot on the National Highway 66 side to divert tourists there to the Visitors Center. The other 1100 acres should be exchanged to heal the round Master Plan. The caretakers of the outlying lands can be offered apartments or Greenbelt plots, but they knew from day one that they were on borrowed land/ time.

Regarding the present Auro-Orchard controversy, lands were purchased in the 1970s round AuroOrchard – Promesse by Navajata / SAS because at first Auroville was planned there. When the centre was shifted to the present location because of a new highway those plots lost their function, and are not sacrosanct any more. Navajata/SAS also bought other far flung cheap plots with land exchange as the only logical purpose.

Toby

I think Auroville land outside the city and greenbelt area should be exchanged for land inside the city.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, Auroville is in the comfortable situation that we have many acres of lands outside the Master Plan. Secondly, recent history teaches us that to buy lands inside the city-area and the Master Plan as a whole is difficult and, here and there, almost impossible. So, given the fact that, to start with, we need to acquire patta-, temple- and peremboke lands for the city, and the Greenbelt following that, if a straight buy is not possible for whatever reason we should use the outside Auroville land-assets for exchange.

Nevertheless, there are outside lands which are valuable for Auroville for a number of reasons, commercial, habitats and/or food-production. Auroville should be careful in giving up these assets because they play an important role for Auroville as a whole. But, if we look how much of these outside lands are actually used or contribute, some improvements are possible, to put it euphemistically. We can easily ask how many acres are actually used for farming, how many residents are living on how many acres of land, or how many contributing commercial activities are using valuable land.

The priority is that the external developments marching into the boundaries of the Master Plan need to be countered. Unconventional means are necessary to consolidate, especially in the (Inner) City lands. We are running out of time.

Renu

In the beginning I was totally against land exchange because I felt it broke a certain protection that we had. On a psychic level, the villagers believed that the land is not ours but Mother’s, but then we started exchanging Auroville land so that protection broke. Land exchange brought in a lot of speculators and opened a Pandora’s Box to all kinds of things.

 However, I understand that consolidation of the city area does need to happen and that land can sometimes be exchanged to achieve this, but not at any cost. 

Some of the questions that need to be considered before any Auroville land is exchanged include 1) What is its environmental value to Auroville and the bioregion, for example, through its water conservation capacity, or through its capacity to link Auroville lands? 2) Is it an isolated plot subject to encroachment where nobody is willing to live? 3) Does it play a function in maintaining green entrances to Auroville, or how they might be developed in the future? 4) Is it land into which Mother has put her Force through naming it and/or specifying what should happen there, and that stewards have cared for?

In general, these are lands purchased in good faith by people for Mother’s experiment of Auroville, so great care must be taken. However, while Mother named Promesse, if I see the development around it now, I would have to weigh up whether or not it might be exchanged.

Thus the evaluation for exchange needs to be rigorous, there are no hard and fast rules, but great sensitivity, study and collective agreement are necessary. Long term thinking is also required because the two circle concepts of the Master Plan would confine us to an island; therefore our entrances are a vital feature. Furthermore, the circular greenbelt has some 600 acres occupied by several villages and temple land, so the so-called lands “outside the Master Plan” may be important in a revised greenbelt plan, considering access, the linking of Auroville land and possible future development. I see these ‘outside lands’ as the spiraling arms of the galaxy.

All this definitely requires incredible sensitivity. There should also be a very well-defined process overseen by a small group of very trusted people using very rigorous protocols. Our previous Secretary established a very strict process which required an evaluator to evaluate the land to be exchanged, and this needs to be continued. The land group must also give full information to the community, explaining why they are considering a certain land for exchange, and the community must support this. If the land is isolated, uninhabited, and in danger of encroachment, and if somebody in the community says they will go to live there and use their own resources to protect it, perhaps the land group will need to reconsider.

The whole process has to be conducted in a very calm, sensitive manner, and there needs to be more reverence for the whole thing. Formerly, at the Land Board when new land was acquired, a puja was done on the land with Mother’s picture. So in the same manner when Auroville land is exchanged, we could consciously say goodbye to it.

Exchanging Auroville land is not a flippant decision. Auroville shouldn’t become a land purchasing and exchange supermarket because the land doesn’t belong to us. We are custodians of a project that belongs to humanity as a whole. 

François Gautier

This policy of land exchange and land selling outside the ‘City’ area was actually started, not by the Secretary, but by ourselves, more than 30 years ago. It has been a catastrophe: not only we lost control of all the access roads to Auroville, from every corner, north south, west and east (I remember that we used to walk down from Auromodѐle to the East Coast Road to catch a bus to Chennai and the lands were all ours), but we are now also strangled, suffocated, throttled from all sides. There are 45 restaurants and shops between Kuilapalayam and Certitude and everywhere around Auroville apartments are coming up, plots, guest houses, hotels, et cetera. It's a mad Gold Rush and it's only the beginning, unless we stop the flow. We need to put a total freeze on all land exchanges and open up the remaining lands that the Mother bought, from the beaches to the other side of the lake.

(This is extracted, with permission, from his White Paper on a Future Auroville. For further details contact François at [email protected])