A framework study for Auroville

AVToday: Raag, how did you get involved in this study?

Raag Yadava: I was invited by Dr. Jayanti Ravi, Secretary to the Foundation. The idea was to do a past-present-future framework perspective study on how governance mechanisms in Auroville have evolved over the years and to see what could be pathways forward. This was an independent study, conducted pro bono. I had a team of three wonderful research associates, Rajesh Subburaj, Andleeb Shadab and Nidhi Harihar. Nidhi is also my co-author.

What was your modus operandi?

There were three stages. The first was archival work to understand the history of how governance frameworks evolved from 1968 till 2023. The second stage involved doing semi-structured interviews with the members of some 23 working groups and approximately 80 residents. And the third stage was to map all this to the conceptual architecture provided by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

How is the study structured?

There are five parts. The first part outlines Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s spiritual and socio-political vision, particularly the terrestrial and communal yoga, which set their works apart from previous traditions. Part two details Mother’s views on Auroville’s urban aspirations in the background of global urban movements, in terms of density, agglomeration dynamics, migration, environmental questions and so on. The third part presents an empirical overview of Auroville’s growth, to identify challenges and development priorities across seven sectors. These are urban infrastructure development, land acquisition, housing, regional and outreach planning, education and research, commerce and economy and agriculture. The fourth part maps this empirical picture onto the philosophical architecture of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, to suggest governance reforms. Then there is a fifth part, which considers the Auroville Foundation Act.

In the economy sector, what were your findings?

The largely labour-intensive profile of the commercial sector, with limited capitalization, means that some structural changes to the economy are needed to keep Auroville sustainable, if not to grow. “Sustainable” means two things: the first is providing Aurovilians with a moderate level of maintenance, whether through a universal or linked prosperity package or otherwise. The current Auroville maintenance hovers around and is sometimes less than the Tamil Nadu minimum wage. The second is that a cottage industry set-up will not generate the capital intensity or surplus you need to sustain the vast catalogue of city-building works. Even if you double the number of commercial units you have today, but keep the same commercial profile, you will not get there. This has resulted in a cyclical stagnation – low population numbers and an under-capitalized commercial sector, leading to insufficient investment in housing, social and research infrastructure, leading to slow growth rates and so on.

So, Auroville will have to do some careful, strategic thinking going forward. The 2017 Code of Conduct currently places a heavy compliance burden on enterprises, with limited credit facilities and regulatory control over operational matters. This is not conducive to entrepreneurial work. This is compounded by the legal hurdles under the Foundation Act. We propose ways around these constraints to diversify the economic profile, with independently incorporated legal entities capable of taking on debt, a streamlined regulatory structure for oversight but not control, all to focus on developing a knowledge economy in catalytic sectors that is entrepreneurial and research-intensive. Relying on donations is alright as a short-term matter but it is not a viable long-term strategy.

Has the Auroville commercial sector developed as was initially envisaged?

No, it hasn’t. Early planning documents envisaged that 60% of the working population would be in the tertiary sector, 10% in cottage industries and 5% in agriculture. But currently Auroville has a small-scale (micro) commercial sector with a labour-intensive profile. If Auroville is meant to be a research and innovation intensive society, substantial prior investments have to be made in catalytic sectors, such as green manufacturing, computing, information technology, medical science and technology and renewables, in order to create clusters which can attract talented newcomers and capital investment. There are legal, taxation and regulatory challenges, but they are eminently solvable. The most important thing is to have the collective will to act and to act decisively.

Economic development goes hand-in-hand with population increase. You also studied this sector. What are your findings?

There are many plans here. You have Anger’s 1969 population projection which Mother approved; you have the projection in the Master Plan for 15,000 people by 2010, followed up by the 2003 Directions for Growth report. Later you have the 2013 Land Suitability and Land Use Proposal and the TDC’s 2014 projection for a 114% population increase. None translated into actionable plans. At the current rate, it would take 945 years to reach 50,000 residents.

Growing numbers is not important for the sake of it, but for two reasons. The first is that Auroville’s aspirations to sustain-ability, in which tremendous work has been done in afforestation, are dented by the urban sprawl that exists today. The second is to activate clustering dynamics that make an urban environment what it is. Here you would have a high density of people conducting concentrated advanced research work in different fields, benefitting from each other’s presence, engaging the economies of scale, adding more colour and energy to the cultural life of the city. Auroville is tiny right now, with 3000 people, which brings diseconomies of scale. All sorts of opportunities are missed at this small scale. Of course, higher density will also attract problems – greater chances of conflict, higher resource use and spatial justice issues. But these are precisely the challenges that Mother wanted Auroville to solve, to develop a new urban archetype. If Auroville can do that, it will be a great inspiration, ‘the City the Earth needs.’

We make several suggestions here, but I can mention two. The first is to build entry-level Newcomer housing, to attract a young demographic. There are proposals for loans from HUDCO, thirdparty housing development, the Section 24 borrowing power under the Foundation Act against outlying lands, grants for research-linked accommodation and so on that offer easy pathways. They can be acted upon with speed. The vicious cycle of housing shortages leading to low growth and so on has to be broken. At the same time, for Newcomers who invest their own savings to build a house, a reasonable exit option also has to be worked out as an expression of mutual trust. An inner offering to the Divine is not the same as a legal offering to a public authority, and it is natural for people to be a bit wary.

The second is to be proactive in getting the word out. Auroville should never market itself, but it must have a strategic, targeted and sensitive outreach process to invite others who are aligned. The ideal of Auroville is deeply enticing for the progressive youth of the country and the world: a city dedicated to building a green and beautiful urban environment, where one can have a simple yet comfortable material life and focus on cutting-edge research in a cosmopolitan community setting. So targeted outreach through research exchanges, fellowships and partnerships with aligned institutions is a good way to attract people but also secure a strong gatekeeping function to guard the cultural environment. In general, Auroville needs to maintain a daily contact with India and the rest of the world across sectors. It should be a hub of research activity, not a remote destination in south India. The world needs to know that Auroville is a place for intensive research, in agriculture and urban planning, in the arts and sciences, in energy and computing, in medicine and governance. So much of the hard work to develop this beautiful green haven has been done. Now is the time for some smart, strategic work to leverage the immense untapped potential.

What can Auroville schooling do for the rest of the country, if not the world?

You also focused on Auroville education. Can you mention some of your findings in this sector?

I can share two short points. The first is schooling and the second is tertiary education and research. For schooling, the history is important. In 2002, the Sri Aurobindo Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER) obtained Central Government Plan Grant funding. A Visiting Committee visited Auroville the year before and had written a wonderful report praising the work. They wanted to set up seven research faculties and SAIIER was to engage in research and publication in curriculum development and pedagogical experimentation as a way to help the rest of the country. That was how funding started flowing in. But none of these things actually took off. Auroville’s schools are doing interesting work, but research translation, publication and extension work needs a fresh impetus. The question is: what can Auroville schooling do for the rest of the country, if not the world?

Currently, this isn’t priority for most schools, either because of time, daily burdens of work or research capacity or temperament. One feels for them, but the sector has to build capacity for a strong reflective culture to develop a body of knowledge that synthesizes daily learnings into a whole. When this does happen, you get wonderful results like the Awareness Through the Body curriculum, the Building with Blocks curriculum, the work by the Institute for Applied Technology and so on. Each school currently operates as an island, and so the benefits of collective reflection, research and peer-review are being missed out. This is also why the development of the Education Loop is an urgent need, to catalyze a beautiful, concentrated atmosphere when teachers, students and researchers are mingling. The spatial element is important here.

I will also mention here that Auroville is at a point where it can setup a Free Progress Education Board, as an alternate to the CBSE, ICSE or IB curricula. It will be a beautiful offering to the rest of the country, which sorely needs this. It will not only give a push for Auroville to synthesize learnings and develop a body of research in healthy exchange with other progressive schooling environments, but also generate a long-term income stream given the dependence on government grants.

Then there is the second question of developing a tertiary research infrastructure across disciplines in the Cultural and International Zones. This is the raison d’être of Auroville, teeming with unrealized potential. One option to consider is a free-progress multi-disciplinary university framework embedded into the city, to provide an institutional form to the ideal of unending education. This has the most significant potential to catalyze change, in terms of attracting aligned Newcomers, generating a meaningful source of income and, most importantly, developing Auroville, as Mother wanted, into ‘the greatest seat of knowledge upon Earth.’ Auroville has a long way to go, but the slow pace of movement is worrying.

A major part of your study deals with Auroville’s internal organization.

If a city of the ambition of Auroville is to be built, the governance architecture will need some careful recalibration. It’s a fascinating question – it’s not a reductive affair of drawing up organograms, process maps or codes of conduct. Governance reflects how parts relate to the whole, how each resident relates to the collective. It’s the practical side of the communal yoga, particularly in its element of power. We are drawn to the Divine’s aspects of Love, Wisdom and Beauty, but that of Power is usually most corrupting, most resisted. I suspect that is why the residents have long avoided centralized authorities in Auroville. You can delay it, but you cannot avoid it.

In a sense, Auroville is still at a nascent stage in its internal organization. There is a strong culture of small-group democracy with no less than 53 working groups since 2001. But the institutional forms and processes are yet to reach maturity. There is a conflation of legislative and executive powers, unstructured participation that ends up leading to exhaustion rather than action, a vague regulatory frame, weak enforcement and accountability mechanisms and insufficiently strong centralization. You end up with a network of loosely organized, semi-autarchic nodes, each pulling in its own direction. I should say, this organic versus planned development debate that is common fare in Auroville is a bit of a false dichotomy – organisms grow iteratively according to plans. Sri Aurobindo outlines this movement, from early organicity to sensitive rationalization, in which he proposes federated models to allow for the collectivist and individualist tendencies to be harmonized. We try and map that onto Auroville. I can mention two proposals.

The first is a representative, bicameral and federated structure for the Residents’ Assembly (RA). Having a single assembly of 3000 people or more is either going to be an exhausting cacophony or a disguised oligarchy. We propose instead Zonal and sub-Zonal Assemblies, one for each of the six Zones of the city, if you include the Peace Area and the Green Belt, plus the four zones. Each Zone alongside has a Zonal Group, which is the executive arm of these legislative assemblies. Under the Zonal Group, you have sub-zonal bodies working in specific areas within that zone. The Zonal Assemblies would have authority to decide on policy matters over their zone. Each zone selects members to represent it in the RA, which deals with issues concerning Auroville as a whole. For each of the Assemblies, we also suggest a bicameral setup, with a Council of Residents and a ‘Council of the Wise.’ This will raise eyebrows, but bicameralism allows for stronger, more level-headed decision-making.

The second is to do with the selection and accountability processes for the Working Groups. Working Groups are executive bodies, not legislative ones, which require professional competence, not popularity. This is not reflected in the current setup, which is an anonymous, group-based popular vote with a part ‘lottocracy’. We propose to migrate to an expert-constituted body that selects Working Groups against demonstrated competence and an agreed upon work plan decided prior to, not after, appointment.

The idea is for the Zonal Assemblies to lay down policies, where robust debate takes place, and for the Working Groups to be empowered to implement those policies in a defined time-frame. Historically, Working Groups have had large mandates and truncated powers, waiting for universal consensus: Waiting for Godot, really. Twenty-two years on from the Master Plan, a Detailed Development Plan is yet to be drafted. Power to implement goes along with accountability and strong participatory processes. But cumbrous conversations and more groups are not going to get us there. Mother, like many others, was no fan of assemblies. Numbers don’t guarantee truth. In that vein, we suggest ways to secure meaningful participation at the zonal and sub-zonal levels, where your voice can really matter. Doing without talking is rash and undemocratic, but talking without doing is worse. Here, accountability is ensured by an oversight body, which we call the Unity Committee, that checks if work plans are being followed and that the Working Groups are accountable to the residents.

Our organizational suggestions may help channelize energies but, ultimately, it is the collective consciousness that will dictate matters. You cannot think up a wonderful governance architecture and then say, ‘Okay, this is how we will do things.’ It simply will not work, least of all in Auroville. The forms have to emerge from within the community to be living practices rather than dead letter systems.

What about the organization as prescribed in the Auroville Foundation Act?

What emerges is that the primary trusteeship of Auroville lies with the residents. In the ideal, the Governing Board can guide, oversee, regulate, approve, but not determine, with the International Advisory Council keeping both bodies true to the Charter. But here Sri Aurobindo places a caveat: if the demos is loosely organized or deviates from purpose, a centralizing push will be needed. Sri Aurobindo anticipates a swinging of the pendulum, which he calls ‘an inevitable and fruitful conflict.’ Ultimately, an equilibrium has to be found. We suggest a triply constituted Steering Group for city-level matters that require their collective wisdom and power, and a system of dual but distributed accountability of Working Groups to the Governing Board and the Residents’ Assembly.

A ‘handholding’ and many discussions will be needed to understand and implement this study, or parts of it. Are you and your team members ready to step in and help us through?

Of course, it would be privilege. I hope the spirit of playfulness, and I mean that in the deepest sense of the term, prevails in the community, to act boldly and take risks. It’s time to move forward and to do it together.