By Dharmalingam Vinasithamby

A little town in Tamil Nadu, India, is attracting a new kind of traveller – the volunteer tourist. Instead of lazing on the beach, shopping or touring historical sites, many of the visitors to Auroville, 160 km south of Chennai, spend their time working on the earth’s environmental problems. The streets of the town are filled with people from all over the world involved in projects ranging from reforestation to sustainable farming.

Auroville was set up by the followers of the late Indian philosopher Aurobindo with the backing of the Indian government. The “universal town” has a population of about 2,000 people from more than 30 nations. Despite its other-worldly aura of spirituality, it is also involved in more practical and innovative pursuits. Prominent among them is its forestation work. The town lies in a region which was once a verdant Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest (TDEF) but is now a desert ridden with gullies and ravines. Since Auroville was founded in 1968, its residents have reforested more than 800 hectares of the township’s 2,000 hectares of land and turned them into an oasis for many TDEF species of plants and animals. They have also set up organic farms to feed their community and in the process are pioneering in sustainable farming methods.

The projects are carried out by a loose coalition of self-supporting groups with their own sources of expertise, manpower and funding from around the world. Other similar groups are also doing innovative work related to architecture, building materials, business, culture, education, health care and waste-water treatment.
Most of the volunteers work at the forestry and farming projects, which provide lodging and meals in exchange for labour and a small financial contribution. (A bonus: as most projects have two days off a week, volunteers can do day trips to the many famous temple towns nearby.) The volunteers I met when I visited Auroville early last year were mainly young men and women from Germany, France, India, Britain and the US, as well as a few from Israel, Nepal, Taiwan and Japan. Some were back packers sojourning for a week or two; others planned to be there for as long as six months.
Sadhana Forest

The project with the most volunteers – about 150 – is Sadhana Forest. Set up by Mr Aviram Rozin, 44, a burly former medical appliance supplier from Israel, its aim is to turn 28 hectares of arid land into a forest. When he and wife Yorit began work in 2003, nothing would grow there except the hardiest weeds. Today, 17 hectares are covered with saplings watered, weeded and cared for daily by a team of volunteers. They also dig ditches and build bunds to trap rain water and reverse the process of desertification.As a result, the water table, which was 8

metres below ground level in 2003, has risen to 1.8 metres below ground level.

The scale of the project and its pioneering spirit are impressive. To get there, I took an auto-rickshaw down an unpaved road. A long and bumpy ride later, I arrived at the project headquarters – a palatial hut on stilts, built from local materials. Granite pillars formed the legs. The walls were of bamboo and twine. Topping them all was a high and peaked double roof – the inner one of woven coconut palm leaves and the outer one of elephant grass. I climbed a bamboo ladder and entered the main hall, about 100 square metres in size. The floor felt like it was on springs. It was covered with reed mats, providing comfortable seating for about 300 people. Sunlight entered through chinks in the wall, suffusing the interior with a dim light. Ladders led up to a second level along the sides of the hut to the project office and rooms for staff children. A naked toddler swung blissfully in a hammock in a corner. The thought struck me that this would make a great prop for a Tarzan movie.

Mr Aviram showed us the residential zone - a dozen smaller huts with braided rope beds and hammocks that serve as dormitories, a community kitchen, composting toilets and arrays of solar panels that provide power for lighting, computers and a Wi-Fi system. We walked out to some plots where trees were being planted. Mr Aviram outlined the project’s strategies: tree planting, water conservation and environmental education. About 22,500 trees of 160 different TDEF species have been planted and 90 per cent have survived. The key is the water conservation plan. “If you start the project with planting, it’s actually quite useless,” said Mr Aviram. “It’s a waste of time and energy. What you need to do is to stop the water runoff; first, to enable vegetation to grow, and second, to recharge the water table.”

When the project started, the runoff was almost 100 per cent. Without top soil and vegetation, the earth was hard and could not absorb or retain water. During the monsoons, water would rush down the gullies and canyons. His team came up with a master plan using simple earthen dams to check the water flow and turn some canyons into catchment ponds. Trenches would link these to each other and to bunded areas where trees were to be planted. The plan is being implemented in stages as and when funds permit and in many areas the runoff is almost nil, he said.

To get villagers to support the project by not felling trees or letting cattle graze among them, the volunteers try to create awareness about the history of the land, how it became a desert and the steps taken to replant it. On some days, they go out to the villages nearby to