On Auroville 2022 to 2025

Thus, many plots of land were purchased in the Name of the Mother, for the creation of an ideal town where people from all over the world would come and dedicate themselves to a future of truth and harmony at the service of the Divine. The land plots initially acquired would then serve as farm or forest lands or, possibly, industries contributing to support the city-to-be and its residents. Mother would repeatedly encourage people to buy all the land required without delay, warning that if that was not done then itself, everyone would bitterly regret it later on. Auroville was formally inaugurated on February 28, 1968; but even before that day, some volunteers had already started living and working on the land and the first priorities were obvious: decades of exposure had followed the destruction of existing forests by the foreign rulers of the area (both the British and the French) who had fully exploited the timber without a care for the future; now the entire plateau was badly eroded, with hardly a few scattered trees surviving, crisscrossed with gullies and canyons, its soil depleted. Local landowners and land workers living in the few hamlets bordering the plateau would only manage to harvest some dry crops once or twice a year (raggi, varagu and cambu mostly) and raising goats; some of them, more enterprising, had been able to invest in the plantation of cashew trees, which would grow without much care and yield a fair amount of nuts once a year, that could be sold for a good price, but needed a vigilant watch at the harvesting time. Those villagers who had readily sold their lands were either doing so to try and ease their situation (this area was considered to be particularly backward, culturally as well as economically, having long been abandoned by the upper castes), or because they had some sense of respect and trust for the Mother‟s work in the Ashram and were thus hopeful of a positive change in their neighborhood. Others were more hesitant or skeptical, if not altogether hostile to this intrusion. However, as more individuals took up the task of settling on the land and caring for it, while endeavoring to create other activities that would also help local inhabitants to learn and develop skills and earn income, the general sense of welcome and cooperation increased. The entire area was suffused with the Mother‟s Force and a vibrant sense of promise; the reddish clay prevalent on the plateau became as if an expression of the being of tomorrow, whose inner presence was felt in the most ordinary moments of the daily life.

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