Issue Nº354

The community has no policy regarding how to handle tourism. Recently, visiting students studied the situation and made some recommendations.

Professor Ajay Agarwal was the supervisor of this year’s group of graduate students from Queen’s University, Canada. He initiated the original programme six years ago and since then has accompanied five groups of graduate students to do research on different topics in Auroville.

In November this year, Aurovilian Dr. Mira Aster Patel, in recognition of “her invaluable contribution in developing Auroville”, was awarded the Auro Ratna award from the Overman Foundation in a ceremony in the Hall of Harmony of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

On 5th December, Auroville Consulting launched the Solar Village Search Engine to help fund its Solar Village Initiative, which aims to power 100 villages in Tamil Nadu with solar by the year 2030.

In 2018, Auroville’s population crossed 3,000, growing by 8.2% over last year. But what might be more interesting from the perspective of human unity is the diversity of its residents – Aurovilians and Newcomers now come from 58 countries.

Thamarai, which means 'lotus' in Tamil, is an Auroville educational and health project in the bioregion. There were challenges in 2016 when the Thamarai centre had to shut down in Edayanchavady.

Dear Editor Alan This is my first ‘Letter to the Editor’ of Auroville Today but I am not nervous. You usually graciously publish all the letters you get, and you get very few.