Auroville is a planned town for up to 50,000 people from around the world. Located in Tamil Nadu, close to the Coromandel Coast, nearly 10 km north of Puducherry and 15 km south of Chennai, it is a place for research and experimentation. The Auroville Outreach Media outlined the story of Auroville over the 50 years in a nutshell.
The Mother said, “Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. It belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within. Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.”
Social collaboration
There are 13 villages close to Auroville with a population of 40,000 and at least 40 villages in its larger bioregion. Approximately 350 people from the surrounding villages have joined or were born in Auroville.
Auroville employs nearly 5,000 local people, ranging from manual support staff to engineers. Most of them trained in Auroville to improve their qualifications and skills.
As per the report published by Auroville, at least 23 per cent of general Auroville budget is allocated to village development and 28 per cent of the Auroville educational budget is allocated to village education. More than 800 children from neighbouring villages attend Auroville schools.
Auroville's economy has ‘no private ownership’ as the main pillars of its economic system. The land, housing, public buildings and social enterprises are owned by the collective as a whole. In fifty years, it has grown to the community turnover in the range of ₹50 crore.
Auroville believes in education as the need for a growth of consciousness. Since 1968, they have developed and evolved structured educational processes for adults and children. The multinational, multilingual community has brought together educational concepts and methodologies from around the globe while basing itself upon Sri Aurobind's evolutionary world view.
There are at least 692 children and youth studying in Auroville schools. The Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER) promotes and coordinates most of Auroville’s educational and cultural programmes.
