The Resident Assembly Working Committee calls out specific injustices, asking for residents to reach out to each other in kindness.
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Written July 2025
Dear Community and friends,
We wish to raise here a deep concern around our collective life in Auroville, the solidarity we have for one another, and how our social fabric has been and continues to be threatened.
We feel it is important to help bring to the forefront of the community’s notice the disturbing lack of care by people positioning themselves as decision-making groups, in how they have been treating other residents, and their casual disregard for well-being and livelihood. Impacting decisions have been made that affect everyone, without consultation, although signed with inspiring phrases of progress and ideals.
Maintenances across the board (over 200 to date) have been cut with little to no notice or justification, without following established community processes, and with no respect for principles of natural justice. Our service ecosystem is being dismantled, and those who held it for the community are being cast aside with no recognition of what they have contributed, and very little support once they are dismissed. They are told to find work elsewhere, by people who occupy positions the collective has not asked them to hold.
Some elderly Aurovilians are not supported, and these people who have dedicated their lives to Auroville and its vision are left to fend for themselves or accept random assignments by GB appointed/backed Aurovilians.
This is an undignified and inhumane attack on what we have co-created, unacceptable anywhere, and particularly in a place with a spiritual foundation with the aim to materialize human unity. Our endeavour, this spiritual and social experiment, calls on what is good in all of us, on doing away with machine-like calculations of cost versus human, and no matter what developments, legal proceedings, or differences in vision there can be, caring for one another should remain central.
People have responded to Mother’s call to ‘all men of goodwill’ and given their all to co-create and help manifest the vision of Auroville. We cannot consider people as disposable, treating each other simply as ‘assets’. What are we building if there is no care for one another?
The callous brushing aside of people’s life and work for a supposed ‘greater good’, by people claiming to have understood the whole vision better than anyone and in the name of efficiency, goes against all principles of natural justice, fairness, and one of the core aims around which Auroville was created: human unity.
The idea of a contribution, which started as a voluntary gift from individuals in support of the community, has been transformed into a poorly disguised tax, then further used as an extortion for visas. This perversion of a once beautiful gesture of giving is sad but not surprising, considering the range of actions taken by a few who saw the arrival of the current administration as a means to impose their personal vision on others.
The trust we have in each other, built from a shared life, vision, and work, is now being eroded. Many residents hesitate to speak out and be seen, from fear of repercussions, or hesitate to reach out to someone being unjustly treated or in need of help. The injustice of this manoeuvring by a few which creates such an environment, and their blindness to or sheer lack of concern for the hurt and damage they cause, is a sad state of affairs.
Through this letter we wish to explicitly call out all these actions and call for everyone, each one of us, to remember we are all in this together. We cannot go wrong when reaching out to one another in kindness.
We encourage everyone to check in with your friend, neighbor, work colleague, etc. and see how we can be creative in offering each other support. Even “small” gestures, such as help with shopping, with cleaning, or other things, would nurture greater solidarity.
With hope, care and perseverance,
Aravinda, Bharathy, Chali, Matthieu, Prashant, Valli
The Working Committee selected by the RA
Written July 2025