A description of Auroville’s development, the Mother’s vision of an international city based on human unity, and the disruption of the community by the current aggressive political and technocratic administration.
Previously published February 21, 2026
We should realize, and it should perhaps ‘go without saying,’ that building a city from scratch is not easy, especially when one is starting out in a desertified tropical environment in a ‘developing’ country. On the latter topic, India’s per capita GNP even today is about the same as Kenya’s and far below Vietnam’s or S. Korea’s. In 1968 it was relatively even lower and there was as yet hardly any sign of ‘development’ locally in domains such as transportation and communication. Auroville therefore began with reforestation and very basic infrastructure development. It did not begin with the vision of a “smart city” but with a more futuristic dream of creating a spiritually transformed humanity, and carefully, slowly, discovering the road through that jungle. This was the dream projected by the Mother, this was the spirit that drew people to her work. And the people of that day were still quite happy to ride bicycles. There were hardly any cars and few motorcycles on the road. The handful of people who settled in Auroville used kerosene lamps for light at night, and handpumps to draw water. By about ten years later, when many of the earliest residents were deciding to leave, mostly from burn-out, there were fewer than 500 residents, still living under very simple, and difficult, conditions, with few amenities and few opportunities for growth.
Next we should realize that the Mother had envisioned, and had tried to establish, Auroville as an international experiment in ‘human unity.’ The International Zone was described by her as a vision that she had when she first opened the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education in the Ashram twenty-five years earlier, and it had not materialized there. Through the Government of India she reached out to UNESCO with the vision of a city that would be built by the ‘most highly developed’ nations and cultures of the world in a cooperative endeavor to share their cultures in a concrete, living expression of unity in diversity, as a model for the future of humanity. That vision has still not materialized. Auroville has, instead, developed slowly and organically into an international community of a few thousand pioneers whose lifestyle expresses harmony, simplicity, and respect for the natural environment. The recent takeover by the Government of India was undertaken with the deliberate intention to disrupt that lifestyle, as was explicitly stated by both the Tamilnadu State Governor R.N. Ravi and the AV Foundation Secretary Jayanti Ravi. The reason given for this was to prepare the way for the manifestation of a city for 50,000 inhabitants. And they said it was a development that the Auroville residents had been deliberately delaying and blocking for the past fifty years.
Thirdly, we should realize, not only that Auroville’s purpose was never to be a ‘smart city’ such as envisioned by Jayanti Ravi, a professional technocrat, but that India does not have the technical capability of building such a city. In the four years that have elapsed since the government takeover, the idea of building ‘smart cities’ on a national scale has been abandoned by the central government, and the government appointed administration of Auroville, under the two Ravis, has not managed to build anything. It has only managed to bring about the division and general disruption of community life. The relatively harmonious infrastructure and organization that the Auroville community was creating has been appropriated and dismantled by this administration, and displaced by an inappropriate and dysfunctional bureaucracy with a politically motivated, aggressively technocratic ideology. Although a few members of the Auroville community have succumbed to and been instrumenalized by this autocratic and technocratic displacement, the community has generally opposed it and strives to maintain its original orientation. The Madras High Court has determined the takeover to be in violation of the law, in two separate major rulings against the government’s efforts to undermine the statutory, authorized, and essential role of the residents to determine and manage Auroville’s development. In both cases, the rulings of the MHC were reversed, after being stayed on appeal for more than a year, on the basis of a ruling by a specially appointed partisan judge of the Supreme Court. In other words, the original intention of the Mother in creating Auroville, the lives and values of those who have committed themselves to that purpose, and the law that was passed by the Parliament of India to protect and support it, have all been systematically violated by the intervention of the Government of India through the agencies of the Ministry of Education and the government appointed administration of the Auroville Foundation, since 2021.
This government, controlled by the BJP under its PM, Shri Narendra Modi, first came to power in 2014. The Governor of Tamilnadu State, who was also appointed Chairman of the Auroville Foundation, along with the current Lieutenant Governor of Pondicherry, the Secretary of the Auroville Foundation, and the Supreme Court judge who ruled in favor of the government’s authority to manage Auroville in whatever way it chooses, have all been active agents of the BJP for many years, and most had previously served the government of Gujarat under Narendra Modi. In its affidavits submitted to the Madras High Court, this administration has claimed to be the sole authority over Auroville’s management and development, which it claims is a ‘corporation,’ under the Ministry of Education. As the self-appointed managers of Auroville, the Governing Board and Secretary of the Auroville Foundation, with its appointed officers and representatives, have enacted Regulations, Standing Orders, policies and procedures that deprive the Auroville community of virtually all the rights and responsibilities that it had normally exercised for the previous fifty years. Some of the regrettable consequences of this takeover and disruption, which have been extensively documented, include the displacement of community members from their means of livelihood and the destructive reappropriation of forests and farmlands that were cultivated by the community. But, more importantly, the spirit of Auroville, the inner orientation and motivation originally bestowed upon its resident members by the Mother in the first years of its inception, has been diverted from that essential orientation toward the disruptive process of the government intervention itself, and toward the politically motivated, artificially construed notions of Auroville’s purpose that it has imposed.
If there is to be a restoration of that original and essential spirit, and of the “conviviality” that once characterized the life of the Auroville community, then it is necessary to address the reality of both the inspired nature of that original spirit and purpose, and the destructive and disruptive nature of the government’s intervention. This is necessary because the Auroville that now exists is not the same as the one that existed in the 70s and 80s. Nor is it the same as the Auroville of the 90s up to 2021. Both of these periods of development, though very different, were characterized by a certain enthusiasm and dynamism for realizing a meaningful possibility, a possibility of freedom and creativity with a clear objective. The first was quieter and of a more “spiritual” nature because of the Mother’s presence and an almost total lack of external distractions. The second was motivated by a liberation from preconceived notions and restrictions into a sort of legal and financial spirit of “material” creativity. These two orientations can be restored and unified, but only by those who are committed members of the community and devoted to these realities. For, as the Mother said, it is impossible for any government to realize Auroville; it can only be done by itself, from within itself, by those who have devoted themselves to it. This has been confirmed by many respected authorities who were close to her, such as Kireet Joshi (the educationist), Satprem (the author), and Roger Anger (the architect).
But this is precisely what the government does not want, and what its assertion of ‘corporate control’ wants to prevent. Therefore, that intervention must go. It must be entirely withdrawn, and the management of Auroville must be restored entirely to the community. Then it will be possible, once again, and without the “international” cooperation that the Mother wished for, and without the “smart city” technology that might be imagined by some to be the ultimate tool of authority. Auroville must develop itself organically and freely toward the realization of the potential that its inner “spirit” can manifest under the conditions of its past, present, and future realities.
By Rod Hemsell
Previously published as a Substack post February 21, 2026