Issue Nº302 – News in brief

ONE ASIA 2014 in Taipei will take place from October 25th to November 5th with the participation of 28 artists from all over Asia. This is the third event of the ONE ASIA cultural programmes. The first took place in Auroville; the second at the India International Center in New Delhi. The purpose is to bring Asia together on one platform through Art and culture. Visit: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/one-asia-2014-in-taipei.

Auroville has a few farms and communities that keep chickens ‘the natural way’. The largest is AuroOrchard, which is supplying approximately 5,000 eggs a week. Now a Poultry Group has been formed by several farmers intending to start egg farming for Auroville. The Group has started working on ‘Standards for Auroville Eggs’. These are not quite as stringent as ‘organic’ or ‘country’ eggs, as it is presently difficult to guarantee 100% organic feed and a generous outdoor space of 5 square metre per hen; but they are a vast improvement on previous conditions.

A 30 minutes video titled “Sri Aurobindo in Arabic” made by Zackaria Moursi, Jim Page, Lynda Lester and Nihal Rashinkar is now available on YouTube. It is intended to complement the website www.SriAurobindo-inArabic.com as a short introduction of Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Arabic viewers.

The Housing Board has informed the community that it believes that the development of Sri Ma as a beach resort, a large-scale income generating unit with a 50-rooms guest facility, is not developing as planned. The value of the land is 17.5 crores and the housing assets close to 1.5 crore. The Housing Board is concerned that Sri Ma serve the community in its greatest priority of the moment which is income generation for both Aurovilian maintenances and the creation of housing assets. Moreover, since Repos Beach’s recreational resort function has disappeared, more Aurovilians are using Sri Ma for their Sunday outings. The Housing Board has asked for community feedback on the issue.

The Auroville Board of Services (ABS), in its annual gathering on August 13th, observed that service managers who rely on a community maintenance find this is too low to cover their basic needs, even with the provided in-kind component, which still does not cover expenses such as transport or housing. Currently it is hard to find people willing or able to take on a full-time responsibility running a service. Part-time work allows people the time to do other things to cover their material needs.

Many services are supported either with personal funding, fully or partly, or with additional funds generated from an income-generating part of the same, or another, activity. Centralised funding for equipment and infrastructure for services is missing in Auroville’s economic planning.

A brand new public website for Auroville has now replaced the old one which has been in existence for 14 years. It’s a fresh start with around 350 pages covering basic information on Auroville taken out of 3,000 pages from the old site. More pages will be added over the coming months.

The Auroville Council, in its first interactive meeting with the community, reported a huge workload consisting of 17 personal issues, 6 policy mandate issues and 4 immediate community issues. The 6 policy issues are (1) Matrimandir executives and mandates, and issue of benches; (2) Housing Policy amendments for young people, volunteers and Newcomers; (3) amendments to the Friends of Auroville policy; (4) how to deal with Solar Kitchen Sludge; (5) the revised policy of the Funds and Asset Management Committee (FAMC); and (6) the mandate of the Residents’ Assembly Service. The immediate community issues are: (1) the formation of the new WC; (2) the Auroville Security Budget; (3) Aurovilians not contributing to the Central Fund; and (4) the policy for workshops by non-Aurovilians in Auroville venues. The Council also announced that it is developing a Code of conduct/Work Ethics.