 All right, can I start? Yes. Give us one minute. We have a live stream issue. Is this being recorded then? It is recorded. And I'm going to record it here too. Thank you. Recording in progress. Let me start by saying thanks to Omar for having me here at short notice and for keeping me awake all night, putting this presentation together. I also look forward to discussions thereafter, maybe not only today but even as in when questions come up. It gives me great pleasure to see that we are all sitting here together and discussing the future of Auroville and sitting together and trying to understand architectural concepts and urban visions. So with that I would like to use the opportunity to share with you some of the urban design principles that are embedded in Auroville's city plan. I would like to lay the emphasis on the word will in Auroville. So a lot of I've heard over the years, and since I've been involved since 1990 which is over 30 years ago. So I think there is perhaps lack of information about the work that had been ongoing in Roche's office perhaps and discussions that took place between him and the mother between him and others who were involved in designing details. So I've put together some of the key points for you to share with you a little bit what we have been doing regarding urban design. So like I have often seen that the galaxy plans image that it is so widely circulated that it often results in the galaxy plan being understood by some people just as a loco almost. But indeed it was a city plan and unlike most cities where people often present city models with road structures and plots Auroville was much more advanced as a design. It included urban design and it included building masses. It's such a plan could not have been possible without detailed definitions of buildings and green spaces. These were not just conceptual that many people think. They were calculated, all the densities were calculated. The poor person habitation of 30 square meter was laid down. Various collective facilities were planned and located. It was all very systematic and planned. I want to recall. I want you to sort of try to study the models that everybody knows in a three-dimensional manner. And if you look at it from this shot you'll realize that all these building volumes, building edges, densities, building heights, everything was defined and that the model itself was a result of detailed calculations that were made not on the basis of typical city planning assumptions but based on detailed discussions between Rosy and the mother about what the aim of Auroville was, why it had to be a city and what kind of adventure can begin once we actually have this type of a city. So the aim was to envision a very different kind of city than conventional cities and therefore a lot of complexity had to be worked out in great detail beyond roads and streets and plots. I would like to quote here the way the city plan is understood in the architectural world. I'm quoting Matavya Niki Desai who are based in Andhravar and John Lang who together produced the most important book, I would say, Architecture and Independence, A Search for Identity, India 1880 to 1980. They quote Auroville as the exemplar of rationalist urban design thought in India which has no formal debt to Le Corbusier. So the fact that it was a rational urban design that led to, you know, that was innovated in the context of innovation in city planning. This was a recognized fact right in the beginning and in fact you will be happy to know that Auroville is going to be shown in MoMA in a few months and as exactly for this reason it's in the context of non-colonial approach to city planning in the South countries. So I want to also for some people who question perhaps because of the haphazard way in which Auroville happened to develop over the last 53 years despite having such a strong plan, I would like to summarize that Auroville was always seen as a city. It was always referred to in all the quotes and brochures that were produced in the time that the mother was there an ideal city for an ideal society. The city the earth needs, the city of dawn. So, you know, it has to be urban in character. On the other hand, Auroville was also seen as a model city in India and for the world. So India, if you look at the Indian context, India cannot afford to get its urbanization wrong. We know what is the cost of sprawling and we know all of us will recall mother's quote about Auroville being located in India. India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties in present-day humanity. India will be the site of its resurrection, the resurrection of a higher and truer life. You know, there are every day there are articles about India and urbanization and haphazardness. See, the thing is that let's just realize what Auroville will have to be in order to be a model city in India. India has one-sixth of the global population occupying only 2.4% of the world's land. So India has a population that is enormous to its land availability and if you sprawl, not only are we going to spread, you know, see the traffic jams now importantly and even in Auroville. You know, the fact that we will need individual or public vehicles or public transport but in any case, this type of sprawling is something we cannot afford. About from the time the Auroville plan was conceived in 1965, we have tripled our population. So can you imagine all the more how much we have to be compact in order to still be a relevant model for India? So this is something really, really to understand before I explain some of the urban design issues. This was because maybe people are not aware of this but Roshi's office was given this type of a detailed brief and that's why the figures that they calculated and the density had to do with that kind of aim that was set for Auroville, to be a model city in the context of India. You can see how India, how compact India is even in the low density areas in former times. We are living in a very luxurious situation with so much land around us but actually the land that we are stewarding right now was meant to develop a city that is not less compact. We know what the common man faces and how cities in India are unlivable. Auroville has, right from the beginning, chosen to address all these issues in a holistic way to radically rethink mobility, density but always keeping human scale in mind even though it's a compact city, negotiating high-rise with low-rise, high-tech with low-tech and all kinds of complex infrastructure questions all of that has been synthesized in this urban plan. So I personally have the opinion that if what we build is not urban, it's not Auroville because it's very important to remember that quote in which we were expected to begin with a model town and end with a perfect world. I mean, of course, there is a utopian aspect but on the other hand, the looking upon Auroville as utopia makes us sometimes feel that it's never going to be achieved so I would rather remind us also that Auroville was, for me, I mean the way I understand it, more than utopia it is a laboratory. So the important thing is to experiment and to experiment means to try out things that we were not tried out before. We are not actually here to repeat what we know has happened everywhere else and if we don't proactively go the planned way then we are repeating already in a virgin land that we had the opportunity to build a city upon we have already put our own organic growth and scattered development in a manner that we may be standing in our own way today. So I would like to clarify some myths versus facts because in Auroville maybe there is a notion that organic growth is preferred, maybe the new residents who come in the last decade or so may not, I don't know, perhaps they know it I'm just going to put it out there because there are myths that I keep hearing about how Auroville was planned to be and having worked on with the archive of Roger I have got to understand that many of the basic essentials are perhaps either not understood or we may even be in collective denial about that. It would be in any case good to discuss some of these issues I'm going to refer to only one report to make it simple for today's presentation I'm referring to the 1965 report that Roger Aunger's office produced and the 1968 master plan which was presented by Roger on the basis of the report he made in 65. So it was a three year long intensive work with daily interaction with the mother and on the 1965 report the mother had written hand notes I would suggest all those who don't want to go through the lengthy archive should at least see this one report it will be so revealing for us. So first and foremost it was a vision driven plant city it is meant to still be that and it was not seen it was not primarily supporting organic growth it was the top-down approach may look authoritative to some people but the bottoms up without the top-down could be very much of a high risk we could be risking the whole vision if we do not merge the bottoms up with awareness of the top-down and see how a true collaboration could happen I always think of Sherwin's symbol and Matrim and their design where the earth opens up to receive the vision and the top-down, the vision heads downwards so there is a top-down and a bottoms-up that could actually merge in a perfect collaboration and that is the way to manifest things in any case so the driver of this the driver for the way or to develop is the vision of the future and the mission rather than references from past cities and therefore in a lot of work that was done in Rosyongi's office they relied a lot on imagination not only on past knowledge because the future cannot be predicted it can only be enabled and I think imagination is a very, very important human attribute that one can build on rather than past knowledge which will fall short for our future given our population expansion so what are the unique features of Auroville what makes Auroville unique in Rosyongi's own words what makes Auroville different from other cities is its program, its aim and its role and also to recognize that ordinary towns do not propose anything other than individual needs and exclusive materialism this is something, this is like a pitfall that we might want to avoid if we consider that the aim of Auroville and why people who come to Auroville and to build this city would need somehow are being asked to go beyond their personal preferences and their individual needs although those will be also covered still the larger aim is important Rosyongi's collaborator Mario Eman in 1966 compared ancient cities with the future approach for Auroville's development he said the unity of ancient cities was assured by materials, tradition and ignorance of other styles that means people built in a similar manner and it was automatically coherent when there was organic growth but given the diversity that will be needed for Auroville people coming from all the different countries and all their different ways of living this will have to be harmonized by the application of simple guidelines coordinated by urbanists and the collaboration by architects in order to prevent the chaos of suburbs that you see everywhere this is also something to bear in mind as we go forward as a result, Rosyongi explained that for him primarily it is a people centric city where the human scale has to be conserved and not be lost in infrastructure and machine scale of you know given that there is such a high density demand so for a number of years he said he has devoted himself to an architecture concerned with man as a social being you know so he was trying if you look at Discover the Galaxy Plan model you'll realize all the social spaces if you don't imagine this to be a car dominated city then you will discover the intimacy and the opportunity for social interaction that was very very important for Rosyongi Auroville will attempt the rehabilitation of streets that means going from road towards street a change from rushways to a satisfying and happy system of circulation from meeting place to meeting place squares, fountains, gardens, pools, staircases wings of shade, sunshafts of sunlight for mobility so now what I'm mentioning here you're going forward are issues quoting only that one document of the 1965 report right in the beginning from the very beginning Rosyongi had asked the question shall we allow the presence of cars and he had written the reign of cars as conditioned the urbanism of the 20th century and continues to tyrannize it therefore the option to follow is to suppress this usage within the town at that time nobody was really talking about the car receding in fact Corbusier had planned Chandigarh for the car and so there was a different kind of Brasilia and other places around that same time were conceived in a very very different manner car centric as opposed to Auroville's plan and that's the main distinction between Auroville's urban design and those other cities that were being generated at the time and perhaps why Auroville was misunderstood also as a design the other unique aspect is that we are beyond land ownership what this means is that the urban design of Auroville is unique in that urban design guidelines and setbacks are not defined by individual plot definitions based on separate ownership so all the DDPs will have to find another way of defining urban building guidelines given that the basis itself is different on the contrary it allows a new urban experiment through a new basis and it's a great opportunity for continuity and connectedness and a sense of unity throughout the city Auroville's aim was to achieve human unity and the design of the whole city also contained a sense of synthesis of everything despite four different zones despite all this complex program the sense of unity is manifested through the design of the city regarding the location between the main roads he had asked in order to avoid them and yet at the same time best benefiting from both so Auroville was always located between the two roads he explained why because they wanted to be near enough to be connected but far enough for the city centre to be still and quiet and you see the green belt is also there to protect that but I will come to the green belt in a minute Auroville why? because in the near future they will become heavy traffic roads and the coming into existence of Auroville will inevitably speed up the process so Rojay's team already predicted exactly what is happening because it was already planned and it was known that Auroville's growth will create even more traffic furthermore in the specific case of Auroville its centre must be as far as possible from all major axis of circulation due to the presence of the mother's pavilion in the Park of Unity later it was what we know as Matri Mandir the population of 50,000 many people also question the population and they think it could be anything there are many theories I have heard or rumours but in fact if you look at the whole conversations the population of 50,000 was set even though Rojay wanted to sprawl a bit more than he finally did because the mother wanted it to be compact but 50,000 was decided as the critical mass necessary to conduct all aspects of experiments and innovations that are foreseen as an integral part of Auroville's purpose, education, economy etc so this quote that I feel is also quite relevant when people talk to the mother about not growing until we have more clarity the mother said now there are 30 of you it is difficult isn't it when there are 30,000 of you it will be much easier there will be many more possibilities regarding zones and mixed use mother's sketch in fact the word zones was not really used at the time and I think later post industrial zoning criticism which was meant for very large cities have been sometimes used to you know smear sort of sort of you know have led to some misunderstanding about zoning and its irrelevance you know the thing is that Auroville's plan through this rotation and through the spiraling that Rojay introduced into this kind of a sketch that the mother gave him for four different sections this kind of approach was done by Rojay's office to increase the mixed use and through this rotation you will see in the city centre it's like a melting pot it's like when you store your coffee you see all those lines they become radial and they become cohesive so the city centre is just one melting pot of all those four zones which radiate into it you will notice that the spiraling movement was introduced at a later stage you know there has been great geometry explorations in a rectangular plan then it came down to a radial one and then because Rojay wanted to experiment with mixed densities to enable low rise low density he created also high rise which you see in the macro model in the lower left and then you will see how it compares and what it really does so the rotation is not because of some fetish towards imitating some form or you know like many people say it is some kind of a holy geometry from copying the galaxy well this originally came through a process of rational steps but also of course there is always an irrational inspiration that also enters and works simultaneously in any case the zones in Auroville are there but in each zone there is mixed use defined to what extent so the word galaxy and the urban form was like I said the result of urban design and rational considerations rather than mere imposition of the galactic shape and form for decorative or nostalgic reasons if you study some of the process work you will understand the degrees of like the amount of rigorous work that took place here to define those roads the streets the character and the urban massing in order to allow a rich variety of densities rather than cities like Berlin and Paris where all the buildings are five story or in Madrid eight story you know it was to allow different experiments in Auroville and yet achieve the density also what is important to understand that unlike other cities we have two important poles of development the international zone and the cultural zone so the industrial zone which in fact was called the economic zone actually it is not it was for for us to go and work it was not primarily seen at the word industrial zone came much later but it was called the economic zone in the plan so the residences and the economy are you know you can they have a very close relationship and you can go through the city center quickly walk through and reach the other side and the two zones which are very busy are are interspersed with two other park like zones one is the cultural zone and one is the international zone so it was very important for me this diagram in the master plan that explains that there are three poles of development one is the inner development Matrimandir and for the outer development because we are not actually here to you know to focus on our individual needs so housing and our work spaces were existing but two broad zones were conceived where our development had to be focused on in order to attract the right people to for Orville's aim so the cultural zone was meant to be a place where we ourselves could work on our inner culture and develop our inner task to you know from the children from the little kindergartens until the larger buildings we need and social infrastructure we need to develop our own culture that's located there and all the research is without you know from other countries from everywhere in the world that are useful for human unity are to be invited so that is the international zone so Orville has a very big role to play in attracting interaction from the rest of the world and the inner research is focused in the cultural zone the external research is brought in through the international zone melt and intersect in Siroo Siroo is that point very important where this social aspect social research will be located and Matri Mandir will be the central pole of our cohesive force that is the soul of our city so regarding climate runoff of water etc also already for those who are concerned about sustainability they will find that in the 65 plan there's a general layout it was mentioned that in the general layout of Orville the climatic data was of primary importance in particular the southeast direction of the prevailing winds they must determine the orientation of the overall plan or at least that of the buildings to respect this is an essential factor for comfort and well-being and will impact the architecture as well furthermore the capital problem of drainage prevents from formulating any substantial option regarding the location before undertaking an extremely complex study of a large area of the land with the southwest so a lot of people feel that there was no data at that time but on the contrary a lot of work was done to get the essential data to conceive of an artificial lake in the center and so on and the things that were not known were left open we discovered later in consultation with the mother mobility so sorry I have already spoken about this but what is important is in the report when Rojay asked the whole paragraph is here to understand mother's response the mobility principle of Orville must be defined right now shall we allow the presence of cars probably in just a few years India will know even as Europe and the US the major urban problem the automobile is the rain of cars I have said this somehow to repeat I will just jump to this other part although outdated and everybody knows it still the automobile strives at its best to create hell inside the cities and kill the outskirts therefore the option is to the option to follow is to forbid and suppress the usage of this means of transportation within the town makes it by another more hygienic less cumbersome and noisy more aesthetic maybe newer if possible mother the mother had answered on the same note with a note small vehicles electrically powered carrying about 200 kgs at a 15 kilometer per hour speed the crown which I won't have too much time to elaborate is to be understood in the context of the city centre where beyond the crown into the centre it is a park most cities are congested in the city centre and they become less dense towards the periphery automobile is the opposite the city centre is peace calm and space for reflection and for cohesive for the cohesive force that is required to define the collective life of automobile and allow the central area of common ground to radiate on all the sides and therefore the crown is the spine of pedestrian collective life so instead of having a busy centre the crown is like a longer length has been achieved so that all the facilities can be located halfway between the city centre and the periphery regarding compact city versus sprawl also that was known before we must also avoid the pitfall of a cold deserted city because of an excess of separating spaces this is our comment to zoning not to build a two-scattered city is indeed of capital importance what we have to ponder upon and solve is the difficult problem of urban agglomeration to avoid the pitfall of the dormitory cities of known new towns and the sprawling of the individual in American housing so the mother had underlined to avoid the pitfall and mark the last two lines and wrote in the margin very important the sprawling of the individual precise regulations many people also feel that in Auroville you can do whatever you want and express the original dream and continue the tradition of building ad hoc that we had to do in the very beginning period perhaps but in fact for Auroville precise regulations even more precise than other towns were foresee the plan of each section will have to regulate its own atmosphere sometimes even evoking a certain free reign of fantasy freedom of ancient urban settlements before the disease of ill understood urbanism imposed its laws Roshi wanted to avoid too many bad guidelines that do not protect cities so he didn't want that kind of building codes but much more sensitive ones which will be in collaboration with architects as time goes on the architecture of Auroville ought to be controlled by precise regulations defining besides the general layout also a palette of colours of fences and materials its maintenance etc to be monitored by responsible service of Auroville this is to prevent an unavoidable laissez à l'air in the future the mother marked in the second part of this paragraph and wrote in the margin this provision is indispensable yet they conceived of a diversity of housing typologies anyhow the best solution would be to come up with a large spectrum of types of accommodations as well as buildings interconnected in series with patios, terraces etc only such a mixture can allow a player volume that is not monotonous the mother had said very good I am in favour of some diversity in the types of accommodations according to the residence typology so there are systematic typologies planned out and distributed across the city plan in a planned manner so lean the force these high concentrations of tall buildings were restricted in order to allow this diversity of different typologies housing typologies these kind of structures were seen as balancing elements so that talked like how to say that there could be enough of high rise and high tech housing that accommodates the density but not everyone has to live like that so that the rest of the city can be fairly low density walkable without elevators so I am not going to go into the guidelines but there have been many guidelines we prepared based on how these buildings were conceived even for sustainability those who feel that the planned approach may compromise sustainability issues we all know for India that in order to be sustainable first and foremost we have to have compact cities and we cannot justify few people spread over many acres as a sustainable approach regardless of if our mud walls are made of mud or if our food is organic the whole thing has to begin with land use and the sustainability and containing begins in India with the containing of the human footprint to a very small area therefore the green bed is as large as it is and the city as compact as it is also we have to avoid the socio-economic inequity that you see everywhere in Auroville's plan all of this is considered and also the fact that Auroville is going to coexist with growing other poles of development in the five villages that we share space with and so there won't be any time for that but at later session we have to talk about those kind of issues that are not actually gone into today's presentation but energy being renewable was a plan from day one solar and you know wind were considered from the beginning to be self-sustaining in using the sun's energy tapping it etc was always considered regarding water I'm going to skip this because I will be running out of time I want to just explain that yes we also plan to collect water for the city seen as the biggest challenge the green belt okay I'm going to have time but I want to say it was primarily its own agriculture it was meant for agriculture for growing food for the city and not only to fill up with forests and wilderness it had to have a productive role we will not go into that today I will now just mention something about the participatory approach you know this is something like a bit difficult for me to discuss perhaps in the context of horrible but I have often wondered if the mother had considered participatory design or only participatory building because she valued the architects role she wanted to have a chief architect she did not we all know what she achieved and how meticulously she wanted the architect to make all decisions to set a very high design standard already when she envisioned Golconde and brought in Antonin Raymond all the way from Japan to produce this kind of building for her for her sadaks similarly Rojie had also spoken about that in 1968 that there was no intention to build arbitrarily there was a 30 square meter purpose in definition and so many other things that have put the focus on collective living in Auroville throughout rather than on the individual and also I found that the mother in fact there was I found no instance of design consultation with Auroville residents during the time where Rojie and the mother worked while she was still there these plans used to not be shown since feedback and so on in fact on the contrary I found there was a message to the architects and engineers that they are not here to discuss a project you are here to build the city I know it's kind of probably difficult to bring this kind of discussion up in a Satcha forum but I just have I'm sharing with you the questions I used to have when I lived in Auroville and saw contradictions between what I thought was envisaged and what was actually happening so also you know the mother talked a lot about wanting to build the city first and then to see things afterwards she created Auro model for the people to live so that the virgin land will not be ruined by everybody's personal agenda so anyway just to recall I just want to show you a few glimpses now so that for those of you who don't know my involvement I would like to share that I came in 1990 I worked with Rojie from right in the beginning you see Anbu who is now in TDC we used to all work together with Rojie and Jacqueline this is in 1996 later you see there is also Sonali Louis Cohen we were working on the line of force already when I had my office moved from Bharat Nivas to Auralek and I was also part of the team who produced the Perspective Plan 2025 it was in 1999 that we did it but the Perspective Plan has only defined land use we were much more advanced than what we showed in the Perspective Plan and we did it because in the series of legal documents Perspective Plan is the first step and there we only defined land use and some other densities etc only that much although way more was defined I continued working with Rojie until he passed away in 2008 in France as well as in Auroville where I used to shuttle he gave me more and more responsibility here we are working on the city centre I also authored his monograph 2009 just a year after he passed away although we had worked on the book together because I felt knowing more about Rojie's process and work would really benefit all of us I strongly recommend that we try to understand who has designed our city and we will be very fascinated at the vision that he has brought down I am writing a second book which I hope to release shortly on Rojie Anjie's visions for urbanism and then I continued you know there is no time to show this but I am just going to give you a glimpse and maybe we can talk each of these things later I had to produce the city centre plans while Rojie was still there under his guidance and we had started various things Helmut had brought this kind of a sketch from Billinger about the mobility but also we have checked with other people like Jan Gale how much is walkable etc and we had produced a city plan I would like to particularly draw your attention to the dark green areas you know there is a while you try to write the ground topic is hot I want to say please look at the ground topic alongside the green network of bicycle paths that are planned for Auroville each and every place can be two cycles you know the kind of thing that Paul had drawn the meandering way with skate parks etc it's a parallel development inside the city centre just like a smaller inner ground you can call it it's a green network space I think we should be beginning this since years since 2002 I am hoping for it there is no reason why we are not developing it hopefully you will do it along with the ground but also even though it's a complex hierarchy of buildings of streets their definitions their characters what can go in what can't go in what are the timings for service deliveries etc what are the paved spaces and the hubs within each and every zone you know there is a lot of work done how are the gardens maintained who manages how much can the inhabitants do what should the city manage you know parks and gardens are also defined and the quality of circulation the bicycle paths I spoke about ready to realize there is a toy train conceived for the cultural zone for the children to go to school after the crown where adults shouldn't are not encouraged to enter there so you know all this has been conceived in great detail also the densities and space calculations one interesting thing I can share with you is that the vocational training centre see because we are not developing in a planned manner there are some zones we have not even begun such as vocational training zone for our youth in fact perhaps it is a topic to take up now that has been also planned with some amount of residences I hope this is a very timely moment to begin developing very important facilities for the youth so that they will retain the interest to live in Auroville and whatever they find falling short can be provided there is so much place reserved for them and for us to interact with them so some more images to show you the detailed amount of work done and all the things that were calculated what type of gardens were planned in the habitat areas even some buildings were detailed such as the town hall the main town hall that has not yet been built that was also detailed and designed in great detail so there is a lot of work that happened including couple of lines of force this is the lowest density line of force that we had taken up near the solar kitchen and how it interacts with the low density structures and what kind of horizontal circulations will be enabled what kind of neighbourhood it can create and how inspirations from Venice and other pedestrian cities like Bologna were taken to understand how the crown would be there is no time for me in today's presentation to talk about the crown but there is a lot of studies that were done and a lot of what you would like to have are actually already contained in the plan I think we I really look forward to the outcome of the rest of the dream we've been workshop but yeah there are a lot of old cities like Jaisal Vair, Old Antabad, Old Delhi where those same principles of urban design have been also tested like European cities that are now going shunning the car and going for bicycles and even in India pedestrian ways are being separated inside green corridors these kind of things can be so much better if we don't first build the problem and then have to fix it if we directly build a totally new situation then the pedestrian life will be central to horrible it will not be added somehow inside a car life and bicycles don't have to only cycle along roads and also the people who don't have to go there if we develop the green network so a couple of glimpses of the line of goodwill that we've been working on since many years but more concretely since 2017 when a group of people realize that we do need an urgent plan to manage the visitors who come to horrible this is the area where visitors center is located at the bottom and this one development 800 meter long if you put in an 800 meter long infrastructure you don't need to cut any trees much you know you don't have to if you build only this one line of 800 meters you will be able to accommodate 8,000 people from low floor up until 18 stories but also manage the visitors traffic to Matrimandir and all the facilities including public transport so Rojie had given us a lot of inspiration for that and we did lots of work over the years to understand the massing I have also consulted with Jan Gale who many architects here know he worked he came to our guest critic when we worked on this project in Stuttgart where I was a guest professor and then at Yale University where I was a guest professor in 2020 and recently I produced a new model for the line of goodwill integrating it with the low rise developments to explain how the base of three or four stories could work to not have an abrupt tower sitting in the middle of low rise like in most cities there are so many interesting pathways plan and cycle paths of this kind of nature that are supposed to cross the line of goodwill and the crown pedestrian pathway to some extent sometimes we also got the first low like the high line in New York so you know these are studies that I have been doing I am just giving a glimpse of it so that when you will give me maybe some time in the future I will be able to explain each of these a 1 to 50 scale 18 meter long model of the line of goodwill that we recently built and exhibited in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art where this room was called co-creation talking about collaboration with previous generations and future generations that's why the housing projects are mostly built by my students from Yale University KDK Denmark and Fahok Shula Potsdam and in the background you will see you know we have explained how it will work on the ground level in the context of Matrimandir and also what one to one scale what the new facade could look like of this kind of building most important is the human scale is retained when you go inside these paces they look very humane they don't look like towers that's the most important thing and all the green technologies are incorporated in the ideas for the facade the pink one is a power generating paint there are solar cells recycled denim urban farming and all sorts of things incorporated for the phasing if we built the city center the residential sector 1 and 2 which is detailed and the line of goodwill we will reach 20,000 population without developing any other area just concentrating on the parts I have highlighted we would have 20,000 people and this is what we suggest in the first phase along with the green network which should be done straight away the whole green network and Verma do you want to take some time for questions yes ok I will leave this out I was talking about patchy development and the consequence of non-planning I will just conclude let's avoid that and I want to explain that organic growth will enhance our individuality and differences and planned approach will enhance our collective life and unity and the city is our common ground I would like to conclude with a message that Auroville is an ambitious project and let's make our ambition our ambition let's honour the promises made and agreements and remember that the best way to predict the future is to design it I would like to end also with this last slide saying that let's take the urban design of Auroville further because first of all because this is what was envisioned secondly because this is what we promised and thirdly because it remains relevant for the future and is an inspirational example of integrated planning with a high standard of design the proof of this relevance is through the numbers of people that has it has attracted over the years and the steady donors who continue to support Auroville to manifest thank you very much thank you Anupama so I'm sorry you won't see the audience very much that's mostly the best I can do we have 10 minutes for questions guys so I think we're going to take two questions if that's okay with everybody I mean even if it's not by the way so make your question very interesting who's up for the challenge okay and then you can send her by email I guess Anupama if you open to receive emails from the participants sure okay Anupama thank you my question is that you spoke about those who are interested in sustainability I am interested in that as an architect I think that's also the need of the hour why has the you know that the geology of Auroville the topography is like a ridge and there are three main watersheds that it comprises why has that you have worked on it so long have you tried to incorporate that into the design and the waterways you didn't have much time to speak on that but the way the water will flow because rainwater is the main source have you been able to somehow incorporate that or have you thought about that so yes first and foremost it began with identifying that water is going to be a big problem already in 65 and it was always water harvesting was always targeted but for up until I think it was in 2002 when we've completed Asia herbs we did not have detailed surveys we knew through Auroville's bonding experience and we based on that book called Dying Wisdom you know in fact we should bring Raman into this forum he knows about all the watersheds the local people knew about the way the water catchment worked in Tamil Nadu, Tamil Nadu is a place where there's a very good legacy for water harvesting in all its various tanks so most of the soil erosion most of the other ditches that happened happened on account of soil erosion that was not being prevented in lands that were acquired when Auroville began the catchment areas and Irrumbai lake and the Kulapalem catchment area were the principal ones I don't want to make it lengthy but after we got this detailed data we had Haralcraft working on the whole plan for the city including water levels for every plinth you know water drainage of the city and there was a detailed plan made and a lot of people who are worrying about the water catchment areas first of all for small ditches you can always have a sluice you know that is easy to solve the other way to solve is some of the ditches or ravines not all of them are canyons that we call canyons frankly there are water erosion gaps so these have to be allowed and yes this has been permitted there are many ridges and there are many first city center plan sorry the galaxy model is full of waterways there is an inter linkage of waters that flow throughout the city and it's very important on a city level to we cannot just we have to have a planned management of water not just they give too much importance to the way out of erosion continuously water is being collected randomly where it falls due to other people not taking care of water runoff in the future city there will be no runoff of water that is not managed with sessions sorry there's so much I don't know how to give a smaller answer thank you so you guys I can I comment or I can only have one question go ahead there are many few things that I feel like especially for the dream weaving team I feel like needing to comment first of all I fully agree with the need of compactness and I think there is almost an agreement today between planners that compactness is of highest value and urban fabric I think I just have to register my disagreement of any comparison between Oroville and the city like Chandigarh or one belong to completely different eras one belong to the modernist era where another one is late modernism coming closer to a different era so this is the modernist era where the focus was mostly on vehicular movement and full separation between passages for cars and buildings and then we started criticizing this by going to an urban fabric so they don't belong to the same time to see them in this way but interestingly we are turning back in a way because while the original model of Oroville was all about the compactness and the fabric we are now more focused on streets and roads and then somehow we are actually making something almost against what was intentionally planned and now the issue of and this is I think very important to those who are working on the dream weaving because the issue of the mass model is it conceptual or not please if we bring the mass model again I can have some questions where are the edges between one plotter and another or one module and another what are the function of each one of them everyone will have a different steward everyone will have a different function the building has to take shape in relation to its function so it's very difficult to see this as a finished work where are the uses the function the question about the water the canyons we have seen in the previous presentation how complex the water situation is and how can we see a plan without the canyon the sun on the crown is changing all the time because you have east, west, north, south how we are reacting to this and I think this is part of the grounding and the work of the dream weaving the air the spinning of the air coming from all the galaxy of all the lines of forces they are coming in different directions in the crown very difficult how to deal with all of this and finally all the systems how the systems connect so I think the danger of feeling that this is a finished work is to go and make roads before all of these studies and maybe the job of the dream weaving team is to go through all of these layers and study them thank you may I just add to that Omar one of the things I would like to say because I have not presented much about the crown the thing is that maybe there is a fear about the crown road because of the way the crown has been executed up to now it is not exactly how it was conceived when the solar kitchen happened and our car the unity pavilion and savagery baban etc you know these buildings are if you really understand the crown as it was envisaged in the galaxy there is a horizontal there is a ring like pedestrian circulation between the buildings interconnecting the buildings you know like for example from unity pavilion to savagery baban there would have been an internal street which is not on the road or not on the crown road but inside the buildings the buildings would have to necessarily touch each other so like the crown road it is a street where there is continuous development but in Auroville it is being interpreted as if there are project holders plots and all that so the buildings have faced the crown road as if that there is not also the secondary internal way which is almost more important for the pedestrian as a result the exact road as it was built with that island over there in front of solar kitchen it all recalls the conventional road and not the public transport narrows the way and the intimate walkways that are inside it and I think therefore people are reading the future of Auroville based on what has been built so far but it's not quite like how it was complete that's what I would like to add it was not as if that the crown buildings happened as called Roger's you know wish for the crown or sort of what he envisaged you know so I guess we are still not understanding his vision about the crown thank you Anupama so now time is up and unfortunately we have a few more presentations after you so we are going to say goodbye and thank you very much for your time and this last minute presence of yours next Rajiv you are coming ok thank you and goodbye Anupama see you soon thank you so much I look forward to future questions on any other forum yeah you will have questions but you may really need liking bye see you bye see you what's going on I don't know what's going on it's not nice to see you right now I think it's great but it says see you right now it looks like that yeah we just didn't do anything I think it's great for you it's not great it's stretching it's you hi Ash hi hi what is it all it was good to know it was good to see Good to know. Looks like I'm not sure. Good morning. I give her my session. She called yesterday and she asked me to take her out to learn how to do it. When they come back for the first session... Thank you. I think that may be easier. I think as they come... I say... I'll go with you. You are really good. 16.7 litres. Like the measurement. That's where you are. I don't mind measuring it. They want to measure it. If you have done it thoroughly and you have done it in the crowd, why don't you do it in the head? I don't want to get into trouble. I'm not looking at you. I know for a long time. I'm not looking at you. I'm not looking at you. I'm not looking at you. I don't see you. Thank you. I don't know about this guy. So, first of all... This one doesn't present. I mean, for me that was much louder than the... I said give me the last round, then I can carry on talking. How are you? I'm fine. No one is here. Wait for tomorrow. No one is here. Come. Go. How are you? I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Wait for tomorrow. Go ahead. I can go there. Good afternoon, my name is Lalit and I'm just introducing you at this point in time, Rajiv. Is there or not? You can hear me? All right. So Rajiv Katpalia is an eminent architect and urban designer. He is a partner in Vasthoshil consultant from Ahmedabad, which is also the office. His partner is a well-known and esteemed Mr. B. Bidosh who has also won recently both Padma Bhushan as well as Pitskar Award and also Riba Gold Medal very recently. So Rajiv has graduated from Chandigarh College of Architecture and the last more than 30 years of practice has done wide-ranging projects, institutional projects, townships, heritage revitalization and also especially he has also got award for net-zero campus designing which has included many integrative approaches and he also got Prime Minister award for Hyderabad Charminar precinct for that particular. They also have Vasthoshil Foundation. Sometimes we confuse between foundation and consultant. So foundation is a part which is a part of charitable trust. He's a trustee and also former director of that which has been doing a great amount of work both on research, education as well as supporting many including the international studio, habitat studio is a part of that. Rajiv has been teaching in different institutes within India and abroad and also a visiting and honorary professor in many colleges in China as well as Rehmanandu Place. Rajiv in case if I miss out on something you can simply add I'm keeping it very informal. I have been knowing Rajiv personally so personal part is me and Shailaja we met in Doshi's office. That time Rajiv was also there's not that he's witness to anything but he was there. We used him once which I know very well personally there used to be a driving theater next to Mr. Doshi's office. So there was not one and one time entry was not possible for people to walk in you have to have car to go inside. He was coming out of the office so we requested him you just take us in drop and come out on the other side so that we get an entry into the cinema. And he helped us so that is one side of story which I'm aware Rajiv has been also personal friend very very warm person and I think is what I have seen through the discussions in the work. Both his professional and ethical commitment to the work ethics and profession I have found one of the highest and also very warm person and he has been associated with Auroville for many many years. They have been coming also to Auroville and it is for perhaps one more time and opportunity I see that the role they have assumed they are assuming is also very vital for us. And he along with his team and with Mr. Doshi's mentorship and guidance we have a very good opportunity to create a good platform where we can have opportunity to deliberate all the possible inputs inside diverse opinions and come with something synthesizing which Auroville can resolve. Is this fine? I should not take more you should go ahead. You're done. Thank you Lalith. I'm going to be keeping you between tea and home grown cities so you'll have to give me a little time. My journey with Auroville began actually in 1974 some of you may not know this I thought I should bring this up to your attention. The first time I came I was a first year student in college I came to Auroville and it was barren red land with few structures few things coming up very exciting offices developing things which I'd never seen that kind of energy and passion. And ever since well with the galaxy plan you keep going around in circles so that's what I've been doing is going around in circles visiting Auroville dropping by circles sometimes become elliptical and I've been sort of circulating around circumambulating around Auroville. However I'm going to take you away from Auroville today. I think you've seen a lot of Auroville you've seen all the issues the good things the problems and there is no end to those. I'm going to move you away from this to something what I call home grown cities because I firmly believe that we have to find our own path. I think that was the message that comes from the country or a window or from the mother that we have to find our own path which is local to us indigenous to us. I think there are many many examples we see around the world and everybody comes and says I want this and I want that and I don't think that's the way to go. I think you have to search within and find out. So I'm going to share with you for projects. I call them projects but they're learning experiences along that just to give you a sense of how we approach things. And it'll give you some clues to the kinds of concerns that we have so that when we are collaborating you know a little bit about me and I'll get to know a little bit about you as we go along. So with that I'll start on home grown cities. And of course I like to show this because the colors on our trucks and every state represented there and then of course this old stuffed bundle. So there is a structure and there is this looseness of accommodating things. How do we fit it in becomes an important part of our urbanism. And then of course I look at this this gentleman was somebody who I met right in front of the gate of our office. And I discuss this is many years ago. This is when mobile phones will be coming ubiquitous and people you know everybody could almost afford them. And there was a time of the missed call that they would give you the missed call so that you weren't he wasn't charged but you were charged for that. So this guy's a Mason and there are five people on this Bajaj scooter. He says you know just about 300 meters down the road there is a chalk and I used to stand there every morning to be picked up by a contractor to be hired for the day. And ever since I got the mobile phone I didn't need to stand there I would be on call. And then because I got successful as a Mason I got a Bajaj scooter so now I'm mobile I can do things. So I'm an empowered guy I mean the term I'm putting words in his mouth but he said you know this is change. So his helper is behind his wife is in between there's one child out here there's another child in between. And the wife goes to all the construction sites because they have to provide proper water and sanitation so she can wash her clothes. The kids have a crush things are moved on from the time that you know there was no hope. The other one was that I look at the way that we serve our food and we have a thali and we have a thali and we say OK here's everything is there on it. You choose how do you want to mix it. So the choices are with people. How do they want to mix and match things. And I think that's very very important. So with that I come to things which I think are important in our cities. If you see these are you know like traces of any city whether you take Mumbai I'm the bad Pune and there is a whole city of Amdabad. This is the density of 800 persons for actor for 50 years old. Now one square kilometer if you take and look at the kind of Bill Maas and the porosity within that Bill Maas. And then you start coming to place called the closer to the in the western part of the city. And it comes down to 250 persons per hectare and buildings are 12 stories and 15 stories and yet it is. Can you guys see what am I blocking your view. Maybe I should come a little away. You're OK. So you start seeing the change and yet the density is going down. So I always wonder how come in three stories you could achieve that density which you can't have. Yes it's a little overcrowded. There are spaces the largest spaces scale of spaces on there. But what's wrong with us. How come three stories and 15 stories don't match. And then you come to Prahlad Nagar and there's only 180 persons per actor and then you have these bongos and things like that. And so these are things questions that have fascinated me of how cities grow change add what is the typologies that you pick up. What is it that happens. And the same with Mumbai or Pune. I'm sure you some of you are very familiar with that. The key in all of this is you know landscape and soil. And as Julia mentioned very importantly what are these are issues that are connected to the ground. And those have been shaped over you know thousands of years. They're not something that you can change easily. You have to start looking at what's been in the ground. What's the kind of soil what sits on top of it. How do you collect surface water underground aquifers etc. All of that is fixed in our lifetimes for sure. You look at urban forms and layout and you say well that's changeable every 500 years or so cities will renew themselves. They will change and grow. And when you come to architecture well 50 years it will change 200 years for sure it will change. What was two stories will become six stories or eight stories. And that will keep changing depending on the land pressure or things of the city would have moved out from there. And then when you look at technology like this mobile phone every six months is changing. So it's quite easy to change technology. And today when we talk about smart cities we talk about smart cities all about sensors and things. It never talks about people or whether people should be smart or dumb. But it talks about sensors and sensor technology is changing all the time. So I mean artificial intelligence is changing all the time. So that's very easy to change and adapt. And then you come to behavior. Human behavior we are very adaptable. We adapt to any situation. That's the easiest thing to change. Our mindsets may not change but behavior can certainly change. So I think when we start thinking about cities we really need to start looking at what has to be guaranteed for generations to come. What has to be done for the next couple of 50 years or 100 years. And then come down to what can be easily changed and as we go along we'll change those. I'm going to give you two examples from the city of Ahmedabad because I live in Ahmedabad. I'm engaged in the city of Ahmedabad. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the world. We've reached in just 10 years from 6.4 to 8.8 million. And by 2031 we're expecting 10.8 million. One side that looks very exciting. It's a growing city. But what happens when you come to growth you have pollution. It's terrible if you look at the pollution. You are flooding. Cities that you know already have been flood now flood. You have issues of parking. You have issues of exclusion. And then most importantly living quality. So that's basically what one starts looking at. Now several years ago one of my thesis students did a thesis on we have a thing mechanism called the town planning scheme or land pooling as it's commonly called in Gujarat. It's very successful. You as the city grows and more villages come into the fold. People instead of paying any cash or things for infrastructure have to surrender their land 40% of the land. It started at 25. Now it's gone to 40% and 60% of the land is retained with them in their original plot. That 40% is used for infrastructure roads, hospital schools, you know some for sale for making money for the paying for all of these things. And that sort of comes about and said accepted mechanism because there's no money exchanged. But the value of your land goes up two to three times immediately. And so everybody now believes in it. In fact that's something that we should be talking about the green belt as we'll come to later because you own only 30% of the land 70% is not yours. So maybe that's a thought that needs to go for the green belt. The other part that we looked at was that when we were all this was happening. So I asked the student of mine that why don't you look at natural systems because every planner thinks there's a green white sheet of paper to land. It has no value. It has no form. It has nothing that runs off water. There are no trees out there. That's the way planning looks at most plants. And we said that actually if you started reinforcing those and connecting those together, then I think you add value. And that value is it brings down the course of infrastructure development because things that flow by gravity like storm water or sewage, etc. That makes eminent sense. If you look at it with public space because if you have water bodies, that's where you want parks and gardens and you want to make that as the most public space. So you connect all these things together and the environment is sustained. So these sort of basic connections don't happen in our planning system for some reason. And though it's a very, very simple thing to do, we said we want to show it. We want to do it. This, the students sort of did this stuff. I thought he did really well. And then there was a seminar in the urban development authority and the municipal corporation did a seminar about seven, eight years ago. And I showed them this project and I said, listen, why don't you try this? That time we had a sensible lady who was the municipal commissioner and she said, oh, that's a great idea. Why don't we try this out? And she said, okay, there is a ring of affordable housing that has been proposed around Ahmedabad. And so as rural areas urbanized, there is affordable housing that is going to come up out here. And you take a chunk of 12 square kilometers out there and work on that. So that's what we did. So the question was, can the existing qualities such as abundance of animals and nature, because these are villages converting. So the villages become the focus of this change. Usually planners look at villages as problems, as aberrations. Let's make a road around it and forget about the village. Now I think villages are also the place, first place of urbanization. You see all urban villages in most cities. That's where migrants come in and find housing out there. That's where they rent housing. And so it gives them an infrastructure which is not affordable by any builder in the city or by any government. And if that doesn't happen, then scorters and slums come out. So this was the kind of anchor that we decided to look at. And new infrastructure and urban functions and of course the villages are then seamlessly incorporated in the urban structure. Now what does increase in quality and lower costs actually mean? The moment you lower these costs, obviously developers say we want to develop this land. So generally it means 20% for roads, strong water, sewage, electricity. 5% for open spaces, 15% and which are never really taken care of. They're just left aside. 15% for amenities, land banks, economically weaker sexual housing, etc. And what we started looking was not the cost and means but at the qualities and objectives that we wanted to achieve. Which was being able to walk to your local shopping street, being able to go to a park, having access to public transport, having nearby schools and cultural buildings. So this became the basis of looking at how villages were incorporated. So this is Ahmedabad in the center. You can see the light yellow colors and that is where Ahmedabad is growing. And this ring is an outer ring road. And that dark yellow that you see out there is the 12 square kilometers, which there are about four villages in there. There are two adjoining villages and the city is kind of creeping on this northeast side. Now when you start looking at this land, you start seeing that the village life centers around the pond. None of these are natural ponds. These are all man-made ponds. For agriculture, you need water. You look at the slopes of the land, you make buns out there. And as again, Julia mentioned in the morning, fields, etc. Give you clues to how water is populated and collected together and used as a collective effort. And there is also then the public spaces naturally out here. The village of Altsitsa out there, the banyan tree and the water body, these are all interconnected. Another thing that you find is this high tension lines that cut through our landscape. And when you start looking at them, you can't build under there, but you can use them for open spaces and connections. And then you look at irrigation canals, lakes, local water bodies, and these are also part of the landscape. And if you start looking at them as assets rather than as something to be discarded, then I think you save a lot of infrastructure. And so what we started looking at was public land and the structure. The plot structure, the vegetation structure, the road structure, and the water structure has layers which connect together, one on top of the other. The moment you put them together, you get a plan. But that starts changing from the rural plot structures actually very interestingly, and this is, I'll come to the next project, where we found about one hectare to about one acre or so is a larger, most rural land only. If you look at this and you start looking at the urban block, a sensible urban block, that's about the size of it. Not only that, but I'll show you that the trees that are planted on these embankments then become part of your road structure and the side trees for this. So you can combine all of this, and all of this can be used. The canals can be used. The Narmada main canal that passes by mandatory open spaces can be under those high tension lines till they disappear. And the reuse of existing routes and roads can be all made together to connect up this new structure that's coming into place rather than as something that is to be added fresh. So that's the largest thing, and you can see the yellows, that's all the connections. So ultimately cities are about connections. They're about connections between your movement and your movement through pleasant spaces, through public spaces, through places where you can gather, from places which are next to water bodies, to trees, etc. Now this drawing shows you, generally the town planning scheme does that. It has one major arterial road, the very small little things, and then little plots of open spaces dispersed in between because there's a certain percentage that you have to work with of open space. Instead of that, if you concentrate along the water body and put all your open spaces around that and focus on that, and then use all the plot divisions as they are here to make these roads with the trees, then you preserve that whole thing and you've got urban blocks of a certain size and scale that work with the city. And then as I told you about the relations, these have been mapped up all the villages in the surrounding areas and their relationship to water and to the public space in between, which was the critical thing as such. And from what we came to was that 20% that was used for roads, we said 15% is actually roads even though the total amount of connectivity will increase, the percentage of roads will actually decrease in the land that we use. And your pedestrian network becomes, and your gardens become part of that. So you have linear paths, linear connections which connect up everything together. And all the other things remain the same. So the municipal authorities said, yes, this is a great idea because they weren't losing any revenues. And they were actually saving on infrastructure. So that's how this came about. And then that's how the plan emerged. And actually you see that the village, the field layouts are very much like urban blocks. They're not very different from that. And then some sort of visualization of how canals could be reused, public spaces, the streets connecting to them, et cetera, could be connected together. And the larger open spaces would have the taller buildings and then the rest would sort of take their time to sort of grow. So you get a definition of a city starting from the public spaces and the streets connecting up and then slowly the land fills up because not going to happen in two years or five years is going to take 50 years. The project that I wanted to sort of quickly go over was this stretch which you see from east to west. If north is up, east to west there is an 18 kilometer long metro line that is almost complete now in Andhra. In fact it passes in front of our office. Huge distinct infrastructure that's coming up. Now the question is that we are very good at putting up metro lines, large projects like this. Every city thinks this is the flavor of the season and they want metro lines. Whether it connects up anything or not is a different matter. Secondly, most importantly as we discovered is that even after you do this, the last mile connectivity is the key for any of such project to be a success. And so if you can't walk to work to the metro line then I think you've lost the game. You'll have this metro running empty, not making any money at all and slowly they'll say well this is not successful. You'll also find that if it takes you more than say 400 to 600 meters of walking distance, people won't walk. If they have to take their scooter there and find a parking and then take on the metro it's not going to work. They'll just drive the six kilometers which they would have gone in the metro. So we said that here's a chance to sort of actually subvert the system to make up pedestrian friendly city. So Ahmedabad has hardly any sidewalks and we said here's a chance to make large sidewalks, allow last mile connectivity and break through the housing societies that the way ahead. So I'll give you an example. This is just in front close to our office and if you see this little stretch out here, out of which 87% of the land is private. The green that you see out there is 13% which is streets and roads cutting through it. So if you look at all the building plots etc. that's how the town planning schemes came up and for whatever reason, large chunks were divided but nobody thought about connectivity. They said okay here's a large parcel then they'll give it to developers to develop it and you'd get gated societies. What we found very interesting was that people would break the walls or compound walls to take a shortcut and some of them started allowing that. So he said why don't we use that as a method and start looking at margins. We waste about 28 to 34% of our land is locked up in margins in buildings in our cities and it is completely useless. If you start quantifying it in terms of money, I think it's a huge amount. There's recently a report in the Times of India for Ahmedabad. There was a SEPT study done that showed how much land you're wasting in your cities and that's why I come back to what I showed in the beginning which was that the density in the old city is so much higher. It's still being free floors whereas in the new city it's all locked up into these margins. And so we started looking at that and the common plots and we started discovering so many ways that you could take private and public lands, connect them together and have shortcuts making this. Now you start getting the sense of an urban block within that. And then those places you start putting in public utilities, public amenities, etc to connect the city. And from that emerges concentrations of public spaces with large housing. This thing remaining on top will change as it changes. So the whole point was that how do you sort of carve out of what exists and see very carefully what you can install inside that and make it public friendly and more porous and permeable. Now I'll come to a competition that we took part in which we never won but there was Richard Rogers who passed away recently. As one of our competitors we had Fumiko Maki and us participating in this Amravati and we put a lot of these ideas that we were talking about into this and I thought I should share this with you. It was part of a larger master plan of about 276 square kilometers and we were asked to work on the capital complex of four square kilometers within that. That's just about a little short of your city area. This is about 4.9 square kilometers and this was about four. And so you see that little strip out there stretching from this major highway coming in here to the Krishna river on the other side. The Krishna river floods, so there's a huge bund. So actually you have no access to the river. It's sort of there's a huge bund that cuts it off. So the challenge was how do you connect to the river, not allow the flooding. In fact you have another problem from the hills. The water flows in towards the center and then comes out and you have to discharge that water. So there were conflicts in the ways that topography worked and that's the Krishna river on top. You can see how large it is. And so we looked at three things. The sacred, the land, the people. The sacred I think it's important to anchor people to where they belong. The land I think it tells you about how the topography, the soils, the species of things that grow on it and the species that thrive on it. It's mostly agricultural land and then of course people and their culture. So we looked at these three things and we said how do we present that in a plan. And so the sacred was that if you look at the stretch of land and you said you had a diagram like a Kundalini diagram showing the seven chakras dividing up the spaces. And each of these formed a Vasthu zone because this is Telangana, I'm sorry, Andhra Pradesh and Vasthu is very important. So it was part of the brief. We'll come to the question of whether how much do I believe in that, etc. later on. But we did this zoning and we had a Vasthu person as part of our team to do this. And from that, the idea was that the principal buildings, there were three principal buildings, the secretariat, the assembly and the high court, which forms the entire complex. And then there was housing in between and there were government offices. This was essentially a government sector as such. And those would stretch in between. And then a carpet of cultural buildings were interspersed in between this that connect these two principal anchors as such. And these were various kinds of museums, art galleries, etc. that came up. So this was the sacred part. Then there was, of course, all these existing bunds and then there were sight lines and there were connections through that. There were canals through that. And we said, how do we incorporate that? And we started connecting that existing trees, plantation on site. I know it's not very clear, but bear with me. And then these public spaces that we interspersed were connected through various sight lines and shortcuts through them. So they made a crisscross pattern of connections. And around those anchored around that was the dense clusters of built form that surrounded each one. And then they were made more porous and so to get the kind of numbers that we were looking at to fit in into this. And so that was the usage of the land. The third part of the people was six clusters of, there were two villages that joining us. Six clusters of local schools and facilities, which were again where these cultural buildings were happening. So they were clustered around that so that they would be useful. Not only during certain specific hours, but they could be used 24-7 by other facilities also. Residential programs so that each one had easy walking access within five minutes to any of these facilities. Office programs facing the central open spaces, which are mostly government offices. And then a system of interlinking bazaar streets that tied up this whole thing. And then, of course, inside public bus loop interlinked with the bazaars, the streets and the public nodes, as well as water based movement through that, etc. And so this is what really formed the basis of the plan. And that's how the plan sort of emerged that connecting to the Krishna River, the main public spaces, the main distinct for the assembly and the secretariat on one side and the high court on the other side. And the office spaces and housing areas connected in between. Now, what were the concerns when we were looking at this? And that was one was health and safety, movement efficiency. I mean, we all know that people walking is the most efficient for non-polluting transport, cycles, public transport, and last and least is cars. Similarly, fatality rate of accidents. And we are sort of one of the highest in the world now in terms of fatalities of accidents. You go above 30 kilometers, it's still 10%. And after that, it just zooms up 50 kilometers, your speeds increase. So when we talk about 15 to 25 square, I mean 15 to 25 kilometers, that makes so much sense. And of course pollution, because the moment you take away this traffic pollution levels start coming down. And the other one was mixed use. So how do you reduce walking distances? How do you make inclusive societies and flexible infill and engaging a program? And so you see the standards for each of these, whether they're cultural buildings is the red one, standards for walkability. And what we achieved in Amravati was far more efficient in terms of walkability that they were much closer densely packed. And so the build form came something like this, that you go through your bazaar street, which is this part of it. Offices, cultural buildings, dense housing, and then slowly to more private bungalows, etc. As you went to the periphery, the bungalows came in. So public nodes and culture, as I mentioned, plus for local amenities, along with that, five minutes walking distance. Public plazas connecting them, bazaar streets connecting it. And then of course future expansion within that, etc. Workable cities meant confining cars, active street life, defined streets and urban spaces, generous sidewalks, limiting building heights, and pleasant microclimate. These were the criteria that we put up. The question of thinking about density, very often that's the model, the model one in the center. If you don't look at FSI 2, you need that much parking and you get a tower and you get this sort of island around the thing, of cars. If you look at setbacks, then you're still covered with cars. And what we were looking at is mixed use and parking while happening underground. Now we are not talking about a completely car-free city, but we try to confine cars to a certain area. And then the kind of densities you achieve compared to, say, Hong Kong or Hyderabad or Washington, these are figures. You looked at urban blocks, what is the size of walkable distances, and we are all aware that finally everything has to be scaled to human walking distances. Because I think the moment you exceed that, then you say, I need something to go drive in, something to carry me through. So I'll just sort of quickly go through this. This is the housing and the rest of it. And that shows you what sort of came about as a model. And then, of course, there was the landscape. So we had to take care of water as retention points. So instead of doing one retention point, there's a series of connected water networks that take you through. And that also becomes a mobility corridor for slow-moving boats to go through it. We also get reflective pools, peripheral canals, and then the green central greens to linear connections, and then finally to village buffers and agriculture. And we looked at productive agriculture as part of the planet. Not something that you have only trees and forests. You also have productive agriculture as part of the entire plan. And from that came also the private greens. And so you get a very large percentage of green. And then the different types of roads, connections through bazaars and basement parking for the streets so that they're limited to this bazaar street and the rest of the parking actually goes underground. And of course, not only cycle tracks along the streets, but also within the green spaces. And then there's the city-wide network of MRTS, the metro rail, as well as the bus transport and a loop bus that went around this four kilometers length. Okay, these are figures I don't think you need to worry about. Then the question of energy. And the energy thing was we were looking at localized infrastructure. So we looked at a certain population threshold of about 20 to 25,000 people in each cluster and saying that, okay, what is the energy needs? How can you treat for water connected through this air conditioning as well as providing electricity at a local level by using the waste that is being generated by the town as well as boring all the rural these things that come in to use that has gas as gasifiers to run the electricity grid. So instead of having thermal power, we were saying natural gas and solar PV was the way to go eventually. And these were connected to also water reduction. So how do you collect rainwater and have calculations for all of this? And I think these are common things, but to put them into one project and do that is I think the important part. Same with waste, solid waste. And then cooling as such. So what kinds of turbines, et cetera, we could combine. These are all worked out with this. And a water balance of how much rainfall, rainwater harvesting from different surfaces that we do different levels of treatment for each one of that connected to this and reuse of course of your wastewater as you mentioned in the morning again using that connected to it as a complete grid. And this sort of gives you a comparison of what the Amravati Capricinct which is this part of it compares to the central vista that's being done in Delhi and the Washington Mall and Paris, the François-Elise. And of course the Jaipur Old City if you look at that just as a comparison of densities, open spaces, a comparison of them. And so these are some images which I think just give you a sense of the city. And so parks, gardens within the city with the built form connected to it sort of flowing into each other, not isolating little pockets, but flowing together. I think the important part that I'm trying to make is that and even when you talk about administration you talk about places of protest and revolt in between them so that there is space for everybody and every opinion. And finally I end up with this beautiful miniature which Mr. Doshi did connected to this and this actually was in a temple so that Kundalini diagram didn't just come out of nowhere it actually came from somewhere. I'll come to the last thing is Nalanda University which we are in the process of completing which is about 455 acres but there actually we are implementing all of this as we talk all of this is actually happening. So whether it's water or it is to do with energy all of these I'm saying can be done and at scales which are fairly large which can be upscaled easily. This I'm sure you're all familiar with if not actually you visited this place and this was the inspiration for the kind of architecture that sort of manifested itself but I don't think it's about the architecture it's about the fact that ruins allow you this latitude to imagine any possibility and each one has their own way of looking at ways and so everybody finds their own little way of connecting to what is there. So when we started we had this strange piece of land which goes and I'll show that to you clearly afterwards and the other one was this area gets a lot of rainfall and it is absolutely flatland influx and the general way if you look at traditional villages you excavate the earth, make a pond to collect the waters for the rest of the year and mount that so that you're protected from floods and so you get this diagram of how do you build and then of course that water is not only useful for you but it also has fish in it, it has other kinds of things that are produced out there and it becomes a part of your life cycle and culture. So this is the land and you can see there is one, two, three, four, five villages that sort of surrounded this piece of land of four and fifty-five acres. Two places the water collects, there is a huge watershed there's hills on this side, the Rajgir Hills, very famous. The Buddha came and meditated out there, so did Mahavir so for both the religions it's a very very important sacred place and so you can see the Rajgir Hills in the distance which make the backdrop from where we enter and those local water bodies this is in the summers this is not up to the monsoons in the summers so we said that's a symbol of what could happen out here and then rainfall, runoff generated, soil percolation, evaporation building roof runoff, paved area runoff you know the old city of Ahmedabad has a collection of tanks under each house where the roof water is collected every season it used to be used regularly now less so because there is water on tap but earlier they depended on that and so they had to maintain it because it was your water that you were going to be collecting you had to maintain that roof before the monsoon you cleaned it up not only that but then the streets because the water would first go into the tanks which were emptied by that time and it would take a while for those tanks to fill up so you never had any floods on the streets because you're not releasing that water immediately on the streets and then the streets would, if you see those winding the sink those are actual water courses or water channels so therefore that's why they reandered around and went and so these were lessons that we said how do we do that so all our roof water is being collected in separate tanks and being treated water runs from the plazas and these things are collected separately and it's actually, if you look at the ahar and pine system in Bihar where they do agriculture, it's very similar in some ways so we take ancient wisdom, put it together in contemporary ways and from that started emerging a plan of how this place could be the focus of this and the water bodies and the connection and slowly it came to like our ancient temple tanks etc there is a tank in the center, the things move around it and the water levels change over seasons, they're collected together and important public buildings happen around it and so in 455 acres we said a 10 minute walking distance from one, from the center to the side is what we should aim for so how compact can you make it, how dense can you make it and so that's how the walkability part came then was the water network so what we finally did was to stop rainwater, you know, flooding we have these holding tanks in two parts in large agricultural holdings which can get flooded in a severe storm but they also give us the resiliency that when there is a drought we have excess water and we use that water to go into the main tank and that's the water that we consume so that people are aware that this symbolic tank is also something that you have to take care of otherwise you will be polluting your own tank so that became the focus of the university then of course you say if there are waterways then you should have pedestrian networks and you have green networks around that and eventually of course you need also motorized transport so you have battery operated golf cart like buses all parking happens on the periphery you have to come and change you don't drive in your cars in the beginning there is, right now when they have started occupying they say everything is not in place so the faculty is going to bring their cars inside we said okay we will make temporary parking but eventually they will have to also park on the periphery and move on so you go in stages as densities grow and things change you keep changing with the times but you make provisions for that in the beginning and then that's how the plan appeared and that's the hills and the plan and that's a comparison between Venice at the same scale Jaipur of the main central part of it the forbidden city in Beijing and this is the Circassian Rosa tank out there and these are our tanks it's about two times that and then the distances we looked at was 500 meters to 400 meters is the thing so ancient Alanda ruins and the sort of cloisters that were there that were part of the viaras as they're called and the pathways all of them in different parts relate to that and then most importantly was this that what you excavate you build out of that so we are building I think one of the largest constructions of almost two crore bricks or compressed earth block that's ever been done, it's done mechanically both contractors, main contractors are actually doing this the other important thing was that 200 villages used to contribute to the required amount of provisions that used to sustain this ancient Mahavira and we said can we give back and so when we looked at the cycle of resources and a net-zero campus we said if we look at this that you produce powered by biomass so whether it is to do with agriculture, crop residues sewage, municipal solid waste, animal residues industrial residues, forestry crops and residues you get your energy and water from there you get some photovoltaics but that in the way that we look at cooling because that consumes 60% of your energy that if you can use that heat this thing exchange between that then I think it becomes even more productive and so therefore instead of talking about high tech we're talking about cow tech and that's what we're trying to achieve out here and I think if that works I think we have an alternative source of energy Bihar is powered efficient so even if you say you exchange with the grid that's not possible the other thing and I think we are running out of time so I'll run through this this is the ancient ruins and you have these serrated edges and so our ruins of the buildings came from that a language of buildings that came through service areas which make the periphery climate towers that bring in cooling into it and collect the water and then classrooms that push through out and we call them the learning towers and then the walls are made of service buildings which take up all different kinds of forms they start from the same structure and there's an advantage to that so the outside temperature cools down this breaks down the thing and inside you can get about 32 degree Celsius because it's rated like a veranda and so you have to go from 32 to 24 not from 45 to 24 so you save on energy and that of course is symbolic too because if you look at this this is like a stupa or the Buddha in meditation as a stupa is actually and from that comes the series of buildings that emerge out of that and from the model we came to actual construction so the first convocation the brick was we gave actually as a souvenir the brick from the site to the president of India then and the next president standing next to him that's of course Professor Amartya saying first chancellor and then construction started that's what you see is a mixture of burnt brick which is the red one and then you see the brown that is all compressed earth block taken out from these lakes which were made all the construction water came out of that we have no bore wells we are not boring any water from the ground from the actual work that sort of shows you the brick making system it's automated, tested tested in all kinds of conditions to make sure that it works and you know the government is very very fussy about the way that they look at all of this to prove it that's the more completed buildings as some of them are getting completed the classrooms coming up and the stupa as you can see being formed in the negative and then other parts of the infrastructure that goes through it and finally that's what it looks like with the lakes there are four such large lakes and there are several on the periphery of it which collect water and this was something that was put up at the Royal Academy of Art in London there was an exhibition and this poster, two posters were put up there recently short context excavation and the material that you got from that and you collected water in that so this sort of forms the basis and then life and learning happens because it's a place of learning and life sort of evolves around that so with that I oh we have another one I have another minute? No this is all about water so I just wanted to sort of two minutes really excuse me otherwise I won't do your plan we were asked in 2004 to do a memorial for the earthquake victims of Gujarat's earthquake this was 2004 I'm still working on completion on the first part because it's been a very difficult project to complete the basis was simple plant one tree for each victim when we found out the number of actual victims there were 13,805 victims and it was represented for us the forest represented rebirth plurality, adaptation, interdependence evolution and transformation and a celebration of life again rather than mourn we said we should celebrate life this is the fourth of trees this is the fourth and now becoming the center of Buju, otherwise it was the periphery of the city the city was on the other side this is how it is for most of the year then when you're lucky because you get only 300 mm of rain even if you do get it within a few hours divided over 16 days this is what happens to it it transforms you know that if you bring water so they said you'll get a Narmada canal let's do the Narmada canal we said no if Dolavira could exist Parapun civilization could exist then I think we should look at this and the journey of each drop of water started and that time we didn't have digitized ways of modeling this so we sort of hand-drew every drop of water's journey and instead of one large reservoir we had many many many reservoirs collecting where the waters coalesced together and so instead of a tank you had many tanks of different sizes that came and collected water and so you could do them over time you could phase them out very easily they were cost-effective they didn't go over two meters ever normally about one and a half meters so they were cheap to do and we decided to do them out of gabion so you fill the local boulders into this into my local labor and you make these leaking reservoirs so it collects the water because otherwise we would just sort of inundate the rock and sort of expose the rock and we got this and so that's the celebration of coming collectively and so that's what it was when it started that's when the first rains came and then for some years it started slowly you can start seeing downstream of each one as the water goes in the plants start taking root and now that's what we are looking at so you can see those reservoirs in between and you can see how the hill is still barren it has this bead growing on it which is very difficult to take out and root out of it but the rest of it what is called Gandobaava as it's called in Gujarat or Julius Prosoporis or something wherever it is it's a wild thing that they got from Australia and sort of proliferated and wiped out everything and then one part of it is the sun point and so I end with this picture thank you 10 minutes for questions two questions oh the tea is waiting yeah or less time for tea less time for tea no beverages inside the room except water, nothing yeah no food either thank you very much as architects from Auroville we are supposed to weave our ideas together and submit it to the Shri Shiva Foundation so from your point if you could provide us like a one line brief or a design objective which makes perfect sense that would really help us so by the end of these three days I'm sure we'll have more than one line that's good for that I'm searching as much as you are because I think I'm learning I don't claim to know enough about the place and I think it's very kind of you to sort of share whatever you have learned over the years from here with us and so hopefully by the end we'll be able to walk together thank you so much could you comment a bit about implementation and how you might see implementation in the Auroville context perhaps at campus when you say implementation implementation of which part what detail etc so I think it's a much more complex question to be taken up as we go along but yes definitely that is going to be the key and I think what we are aiming for here all these exercises is to move towards implementation rather than to just talk about things I think that's a given a time frame within which we would like to do this and so I think we all have to fall in step and move towards that can I ask you a question for the owner if you have any questions we have five more minutes I have a small question it's about the project in front of your office so you showed that how did you manage to talk about those private spaces right right so there are what you call common plots there are margins so this is entirely out of common plots and margins and then there are some government lands locked in also ownership is by the government then there are some institutions which have larger land holdings than they are actually using which could be borrowed from them because they are also getting some benefits so you start I'll tell you what you know when I worked on the Charminar which was a recent in Hyderabad it was a real challenge because firstly that time Chandrabababu Naidu was the chief minister and he engaged us when it came to actually implementing anything he said this is not my constituency we will talk to the AIM and so you know this gentleman who comes quite often on TV nowadays he was the person I had to deal with okay the thing that happened was that we discovered because we walked around every square inch of that space we understood every nook and cranny that was there we understood how many schools were there we found that shop owners had a say in things we found that schools which were using their playground for a certain amount of time would be willing to time share it with the city to open it up as public spaces for a certain time as long as they were maintained so there were you started making connections and it's the same way as what I'm talking about these housing societies of course the big this thing out there is that now in a 100 meter stretch from each of the metro rail they're saying you can get up to FSI 4 so from 1.8 they can go to 4 so that's a big carrot but to go there you will end up with these towers now question is that also all homeowners etc in societies are not going to agree so we said there is a mechanism that ok you can't go to 4 but if you have a small if you have a house there or a plot in a housing society can you go up more than what you are because needs change over time and that itself will allow changes it doesn't go to 4 but it goes to say 2.4 or 2.5 and that itself will bring in change so but when you do that reconstitution you start getting chunks of land which are locked in so the trick is to really engage in a lot of detail so how much time does it take for this kind of stuff how many people do you engage in that a lot I mean this goes over at least a 6 to 8 month period so because there are so many stakeholders and you go through the government mechanism of how you deal with stakeholders etc when you have meeting and then informally also you know people you know builders house owners you know these things so you also informally engage with them that's how you get information to start saying that what is possible 6 to 8 months why your timelines are very generous I mean why very ok so I think Juryu is going to be the last one ok thank you it's interesting that just the time like we said and the fact that you have to deal with government agencies I think my personal opinion I'm very much interested in the process we have to somehow feel a deep wound which is structural problem which is lack of institutional memory it's very common that whatever project which is spanning over a certain amount of time falls on somebody's hands first but then there is a turnover of people in the administration office or whatever and somehow the memory is lost and then again you have to start again reinventing the wheel do you think that this dream neighbors and your help in this can also touch this subject yes certainly I'm hoping to I mean that's why I'm standing in front of you and I really feel that it's a great opportunity that David and Omar have initiated this dream when I saw their first presentation which David made some time ago when I come last time I thought it was a great opportunity to engage with the people and collaborate in a meaningful way because ownership has to be local it cannot be by people who parachute in from outside and claim to know everything you don't and so it's always the case that I think you have to learn to listen and I'll also just add another caveat to this you know the last project that I showed you I've been working on it for 16 years it's now reaching completion okay in between we've gone through four chief ministers it started with our present prime minister it was his dream it has now moved on to subsequent this thing the number of CEOs of the state disaster management authority that's too many to count that have changed the people who work with them have changed and the only constant that the people of which which I have had very often had to have public meetings to explain to them because the last set okay this is what we there was a rumor at some point that was going on on the side that we were taking over stones from there all kinds of things happen but I think if we decide that we need to do something it will happen and I don't think we should lose hope see all of these are things that can be addressed so all the universities are here seven years it's not something that happens in I'm on my third vice second vice chancellor man you are the institutional memory you have to keep it going all of you are the institutional memory and you can't forget that it's your place thank you are we done can I have tea so guys next is Tuan he's going to talk about electricity energy distribution you have tea outside we are aiming starting at 4 30 Tuan's presentation is going to be a little longer it's going to be one hour and a half so we should finish by six one two one two yeah I was looking at the retreat I mean it's I was looking at it more at the social scale I was noticing people were coming out again and sitting with others yes now you can tell the truth no I thought it was important for our social family yes but I agree with you materially we had we had the entrepreneurs the economy self-supporting we had a government do you want to use this so you have a pointer here I'll turn it off sorry turn it on again so you have a pointer here and down a row is going to be next the pointer is the top last one sorry you cannot stand too long you have to be behind the speaker welcome back everybody so the very last session today topic energy and electrical distribution planning I'll very briefly for the people who don't know them introduce Tuan and Bundeswami I'll read this it sounds quite impressive Tuan is co-founder of Auroville Consulting worked for many years on the construction in Matrimandir and later founded and managed several community services he's also a founding member of the Auroville Renewable Energy Group which later evolved into several Auroville Renewable Energy Units and activities for 12 years he held senior management positions in the global renewable energy sector he also contributes to Auroville's infrastructure planning and development with a focus on energy just a quicky there's a bit of a narrative developed over the last few days or weeks even that we're only 3,000 motors here at present and we really need to consider the needs of the 47,000 still to come Tuan is one of the few Aurovillians I know of he came in the very early days who from the very beginning of being here was thinking about the extra 47,000 in terms of laying the cables and the things like that so I just wanted to put that in as a note Bundeswami has been managing electrical service Auroville Electrical Service since 1991 looks after all the electrical needs of Auroville and Aurovillians including T&EB Nealazone work for new service connection, line extension line deviation, transformation upgradeation work as well as internal and external electrical work what I remember and appreciate more than anything just over 10 years ago we had Cyclo and Tiny those of you who were still here or were here then Auroville was devastated many trees went down windmills collapsed some houses were badly damaged and of course the electrical system was hit very very hard indeed what I remember was Bundeswami and his team worked night and day for days to get the connections back and I think we got the connections back way before almost anybody else in Tamil Nadu so it just gives a sense of that spirit of service Bundeswami and bodies so I'm handing it over they're going to do a soft shoe shuffle not quite sure how they're going to arrange this between them but then yes good afternoon everyone today is a very special day every year there is one day when the distance between the sun and the earth is the minimum that happens to be today today on the 4th of January we have the minimum distance between the sun and the earth so it's quite symbolic when we talk on that day about energy I had once drafted an Auroville energy vision and the reason that it is still called draft after I don't know how many years is because I don't know who will approve it who will make this draft into a permanent document so probably will remain a draft for all times to come but the draft is basically saying that in Auroville in the context of Auroville for a different purpose than you normally do that we only consume energy from sustainable sources and if we during the process of construction would consume non-sustainable energy that we have to compensate for that in the future and that finally what really makes Auroville and the world as a whole sustainable is of course an integral sustainability and the transformation of matter as the Auroville vision so what are the objectives of an electrical energy system or systems you want to have uninterrupted quality electrical energy for everyone it has to be a mix of sources preferably distributed geographically you have to store the energy somewhere you have to save energy with energy conservation and efficiency measures you have to have a demand supply flexibility that the generation of renewable energy will never match exactly the demand, the instantaneous demand then you can do it through a system of clusters and I'm going to explain that system in a moment and of course we have to create awareness among our own residents for responsible energy management and then there is the question of energy budgeting the strategy would be if you want to implement those objectives that you optimize, maximize on-site renewable energy as much as possible on-site you install and operate an internal grid so that you can share the renewable energy which is generated in different clusters you wouldn't have sub grids within that system of Auroville Township you would have monitoring and reporting systems to know whether it is working and how it is working and how you can improve it you would have building designs that optimize energy conservation and efficiency as much as possible the systems should be modular especially in a relatively slow growing township you want a modular system and then a distribution backbone to be built ahead of zone and sector development that is going to be covered more in the second presentation on distribution and then of course we have this electricity master plan which is going to be covered in the next presentation now today we have data pretty reliable of 2019 I'm sorry that we don't have it of 2020 and more 21 but it is not much different solar energy would have gone from 6% to probably 10 or 11% now grid energy and then we have wind energy you know Auroville Foundation owns a wind turbine which is located near Coimbatore and the energy from that is being wheeled to Auroville but as you can see there is still a long way to go to make it 100% renewable now coming to the cost when you invest in a solar system or even in a wind energy system or in a biomass system you have a capital cost which is fixed and you have very low relatively speaking very low maintenance cost because there is no fuel to be fed into the system so typically today if you would you know make a calculation on the cost of solar energy much below 5 rupees small scale would be about 450 per kilowatt hours and if you do a large scale like they do in these utility scale plants they come even below 3 rupees a kilowatt hour versus the grid power that you buy from outside which is going up typically average by 5% per annum to adjust for the inflation so you see that delta keeps on increasing and therefore even financially you can completely justify an investment in renewable energy there is a worrying trend to be very frank in our review that our per capita consumption has increased from 1390 kilowatt hours per person in 2012 almost 2400 in 2020 now there are various factors for that you know the scheme where electricity is distributed free has definitely influenced this there was also some suppressed demand which got fulfilled but definitely this is not a very good trend and you know we should make sure that we do not when we have a presentation next year that the column is still higher because the idea is not to consume more but to consume less so if we want to achieve a 100% renewable zero carbon energy system how do you do that the first thing you do is this is an energy pyramid that we designed a couple of years back for a book called the source book for Asia we designed it in our consulting and it has been used by that book you always have to go through these steps when you look at energy they are not necessarily done sequentially they can be done in parallel so the first is need versus greed now need versus greed is extremely subjective very subjective what somebody will consider as greed somebody else will feel it as a basic need but I suppose that in this room we all agree that if you enter in these five star hotels and the thermostat if there was a thermostat has been set at 1890 degrees where a sweater that's not in need and that's not a greed either that is your stupidity because you don't need 1890 degrees centigrade when you come from outside 35 36 even bringing it down to 30 or 29 already you feel better but it's all about relativity so that is the first one the second is conservation so suppose that we all agree that we need say 300 lux to read then definitely in the daytime I can read with daylight I don't close the curtains and then read with an artificial lamp that is a very basic example of conservation so conservation means maximum use of the natural resources to fulfill your basic need energy efficiency is about now suppose we agree and I think we do that after dark we need lights then how can I get my 300 lux in the same example with the minimum amount of energy that is the subject of energy efficiency and then comes renewable energy and then maybe for the time being we still have some fossil fuel and hopefully in a couple of years from now that last part of the reverse pyramid will be zero that is what we all should aim for so this exercise is typically done and to give you just an example here we show an energy 100 units of energy doesn't matter what it is 100 tons, 100 kilowatt hours is generated on the left goes to all sorts of processes heat becoming mechanical energy mechanical energy becoming electric energy transmission distribution and finally we see on the right there we see a lamp on and now if we would replace that incandescent lamp with a CFL not even an LED that 100 of the first picture becomes 25 so we don't have much control over what happens on the left side but we have a lot of control over what happens on the right side that is the demand side so by simple measures like that we can make sure that in this example 100 becomes 25 and that we reduce the dependence on fossil fuel to start with now we did in consulting out of consulting we did a very interesting exercise in fact for the TDC last year to look at various scenarios of per capita consumption with a growing population and we arrived at a consensus that this green column is probably a realistic one now you will say yes but that is higher than the per capita that you showed earlier yes it is higher because we believe there will be more electric mobility we believe that we have to migrate from the LPG cooking gas bottles to some other cooking methodologies so if you remove the fossil fuel mobility and replace it with e-mobility and you get rid of the gas bottles 3000 kilowatt hours per person seems to be realistic if that is the case we have made a basically a table where we look at the estimation of megawatts needed of solar energy so as you can see when we have 15,000 people we need 27 megawatt and when we have 50,000 we need 90 megawatt of solar energy we have done the same thing for storage now storage is actually the missing piece in the puzzle today can somebody tell me the energy which is in coal, oil and gas where does that energy come from anyone any gas coal, oil and gas has energy now you know the answer because you were in an earlier workshop where does that energy come from from the sun from the sun so I would request you that from today onwards you look at coal, oil and gas just as three big batteries they are not a source of energy just like groundwater in the morning it was explained groundwater is not a source the source if I told you the source is rain water same story with energy the source is the sun and coal, oil and gas through a photosynthesis process took many, many years has generated coal, oil and gas with energy in it so in fact the whole energy story is about replacing those three batteries coal, oil and gas with sustainable batteries fortunately we don't have to discuss the source the source is the same the sun it's the only source and you know what is nice about that source it does generation it does transmission and it does distribution when you stick your hand out of the window you catch solar energy you don't have to go anywhere for coal I have to go to a coal mine or I have to go to a harbor where the coal is brought for wind I have to go to a windy area but for sun I don't have to go anywhere so you can generate solar energy where you need it you don't need to go to a centralized place and generate it and by the way storage sometimes people come to me also and they say look tomorrow all the solar energy is very nice but why are we still connected to the grid why can't we just switch off the connection with teeny bee he will also be jobless and be on our own so then I usually tell these people have you brought to a checkbook very good please sit down because we made a calculation that if we go with the present growth of population we would need by 2025 5.4 megawatt of solar energy capacity that will cost about 27 crores in the last 20 years so that is doable but for two days of autonomy two days only you have to make an investment of 97 crores of storage and that you have to do every 7 8 years because storage the batteries don't last now and two days of autonomy is not enough because we have for example in that in November we had this rainy day after rainy day so you would need at least 5 6 days of storage so just to give you an illustration that cutting off from the outside grid now would mean incredible investments so what we are doing is that every financial source that we can find we push it now into generation of energy so we have a bit of storage but the storage we will do later because we expect also the cost per kilowatt hour to come down in the coming years but even I would say even if the cost of storage comes down I would always recommend to keep connected with the public because you will never ever have an exact match between what you generate and what you need so if you are connected to a wider pool there is an offset happening at the regional, state and regional level so then we said what are the cost implications so here you see it with let us take 15,000 people 122 crores for solar and 51 crores for 2 hour backup by the way this is only 2 hour backup not 2 days even just to illustrate how expensive storage is as of now today a lead asset battery is costing about LTM IN is about 16 to 18 and we are being told that so much of research is going on that LTM IN will probably come below the 10,000 in maybe another 3, 4, 5 years in that case storage becomes definitely a more interesting proposition the area requirement, that's another interesting one there is an article which came in the Hindu this Sunday and it is very negative about solar very negative but it is negative about sorry not solar if you read the article it is negative about solar on land in fact in the last paragraphs he says do it on rooftops so when I first read this article I started reading oh I better cancel the presentation for the for the dream weaving but then when I read the article it says no we should do it on roofs percentage of the out of the roofs would you need for 100% solar generation with say 15,000 with 50,000 population it is 37.55 so if we would allocate about 40% of rooftops for solar and maybe the rest for urban agriculture then we are done as far as the generation is concerned so no need to convert agricultural land to solar plants it is not required at all and in fact we have been promoting this rooftop solar since many many years I can proudly tell you that our team designed the solar energy policy of Pondicherry completely we contributed to Tamil Nadu we wrote something for Orissa the Delhi policy was written two thirds by us because we always believe that the future is rooftop solar and not these huge plants if you take for example the 650 megawatt plant of the Adani company in south of Tamil Nadu if a cloud formation passes over that system 650 megawatt suddenly becomes maybe 100 megawatt or 50 megawatt right whereas if it is distributed a cloud over Wilapuram does not mean there is a cloud over Chennai so you have also spread your risk not a very big advantage of distributed solar is in the case of centralized solar suppose the substation near that 650 megawatt of Adani has a problem so 650 megawatt gets cut off from the grid but the demand continues whereas in rooftop solar if in a particular street the cable fails or the fuse blows the generation stops but also the consumption so the advantage of distributed solar is that you match always generation with demand whereas in centralized solar you don't so we have been very strong proponents of distributed rooftop solar so what are the other things you have to look at flexible loads you have to be able to meet the flexible load you know you can for example say why should a washing machine run in the night it can run between 10 and 12 or 11 and 2 because there is plenty of solar energy so those loads which do not depend on a time you run them when there is solar energy you don't have that choice in case of lights, lights you need in the night but there are many other things that you can do when the sun is shining we have already worked with various regulators in the country to get TOD time of the day even for solar to anchorage solar generators to generate a solar when the grid needs it I have already mentioned transport cooking and there are so many other migrations which can happen cooling there is always air conditioning there is always a very hot topic although it is about cooling what is our strategy for cooling there are definitely buildings which require cooling I can think of a health facility or the people of a place where people stay who have some diseases and they have to be taken care of so we have studied centralized cooling instead of all these individual air conditioners and it is not today's topic but it shows some very interesting results we did in 2019 and 2020 and 2021 we did the first phases of what we have called the smart mini-grid I am happy to tell you that the Ministry of Power, Government of India has endorsed this project with a very nice letter and is following the performance of it because they believe this is also the future for most of our cities. How does this work you define a cluster so in this case this is the town hall cluster you see the foundation of all these buildings and that cluster you use the roofs you put solar on those roofs without worrying whether the building below those panels will absorb that energy doesn't matter there is no matching required because the surplus flows into the cluster normally when you do individual solar you have to make sure that you don't produce too much because then you export it and you hardly get anything for it or too little here we don't worry we just see okay you see those roofs they are fully utilized because we didn't have to match the capacity of the solar system with what that particular building happens to be consuming now in the future it is cluster wise done now just imagine if you have clusters like this all of our will and you interconnect those clusters which we are doing now almost now famous high tension ring cable then what happens the instantaneous surplus of the cluster as a whole travels over the ring to other clusters of our will which happen to be in deficit and at any given time of the day there will be clusters in surplus and there will be clusters in deficit it will happen once in a million times that one cluster generation matches exactly the demand for maybe one or two seconds so by interconnecting clusters with solar and storage there is also storage in this you get a very resilient modular, upgradable easy maintainable system without using any land only rooftops now this is a very interesting picture so all the solar systems that have been installed are connected with the out of electrical service Prasano is there he is monitoring all that so he can see on his computer minute by minute, second by second what is happening with the help of a product which has been developed in our field called the Wattmon so every system has got a Wattmon and the Wattmon are connected to internet and the internet is connected to his computer so he can see what is happening now here you see a picture of various clusters in fact this is transformer wise clusters which is easier for us too and you see that line below here this one now this is the surplus of that cluster which we just now saw namely the town hall generating between what time roughly 9.20 and 3.34 more than what it needs and that energy of town hall this is a town hall curve travels to other parts of our wheel as a result of which the whole curve of the whole of our wheel is almost coming 0 here right so 1, 2 or 3 clusters in surplus compensate for 1, 2, 3 clusters in deficit and you try to get to 0 but what would you do if you had more storage then let us put it this way suppose there are so many clusters in surplus that the total line of the high tension connection yard this one goes below 0 then you are exporting to the public grid now if you have enough storage in place you can then trigger storage being charged and then what you can achieve that these morning peaks and the evening peaks can be flattened because when the evening peak starts you take from the storage that you stored in the daytime and you do the same thing in the morning so then this curves becomes much flatter and you can also use the peak shaving or peak shifting peak shifting means that I shift this peak to the daytime by storing so the combination of distributed solar energy and distributed storage gives us the possibility to A have a very resilient system B with storage combined to shave our peaks and eventually to come to a net 0 when the whole line will be the whole day above it so we have concluded in our team that we can definitely achieve a sustainable energy future definitely also with the population of 50,000 just 40% less of the roofs and some battery storage what we are doing now in out of electrical service Poonu's army and his team they have started a new vertical and they call it solar energy pull so what they do is every time we have a grant few years back from a very helpful company and with that grant we install 200 kilowatt of solar and then what we said was okay the energy the payment that normally would have gone to teeny bee which is now not going to teeny bee because we are generating it ourselves that payment goes into installing more solar and to maintain the 200 kilowatt which already is there so this 200 already has become 300 without disturbing any cash flow or whatever suppose yesterday 100 rupees was going to teeny bee now only 90 goes to teeny bee and the 10 goes to this project so then you make a self supporting sustainable financially also system where the solar energy keeps on growing we have calculated that if you start with say 100 kilowatt in year 1 you get three times that in year 20 so by the time the economic life of the first batch is coming to an end you have already double of that operating and that's how you can grow the system very fast so we have come to the conclusion we can have 100 percent renewable and zero carbon energy starting from 2025 if we can at this I said 5.4 megawatt we have about 500 kilowatt operating only 10 percent so we have to make a lot of effort to put another 5 megawatt of solar and storage and then we have 100 percent renewable from that year onwards already so the question is are you ready or what ready or not huh this is the end of the lecture yes we can do the questions on this part first if you like and then Poonu Swami will do the we do together the distribution part how are we doing on time we are doing good or not so other questions about this particular presentation you mentioned the wind turbines and that you are wheeling that energy how does that work you selling the energy to somewhere and then that money is going into or how does that work you see it is a unit called Varuna I am not part of that unit but I know how it works they have totally 5 wind turbines one turbine has been transferred to let us say the books of the Auroville Foundation in about 7-8 years ago and that is in wheeling mode so wheeling mode means that the energy that that wind turbine generates is deducted in kilowatt hours from the bill of Auroville at the high tension connection so let us give an example suppose you consume 1 lakh units and the wind turbine has generated 30,000 units you get a bill for 1 lakh minus 20,000 minus some wheeling charges so that is called the wheeling what they do with the other turbines the other four of which I think 2-1 Kanataka and 3 in Tamil Nadu there they sell the power to third parties and that money they donate to Auroville for electricity now you could ask why are they not wheeling more the problem is we cannot absorb a second wind turbine you see absorbing in a sense we do not consume enough with the solar that we have now because you cannot do a little bit wheeling either wheel or you don't wheel I mean you can do partial wheeling but then they sell the surplus to the teeny bee for a ridiculously low price so if you do wheeling you should only do it if you can absorb say about 90% also of that wind turbine generation so today Auroville can absorb one wind turbine generation and not yet two and of course there is a little bit of a healthy competition going on because the more solar we put the less room is therefore so there is a nice competition between wind and solar going on right now but that's basically how the wheeling works so that means actually that the money which is coming from Varuna to pay for the electricity of the Aurovillians is just it's not green electricity we are getting it's just green money because the green electricity is already being sold once you can't sell the same electricity twice exactly so the four turbines of which the energy if I say anything wrong please correct me because he is the one who knows all the data the four you are selling so the four that they are selling the energy of they get revenue first they pay maintenance they have a maintenance contract auto charges, teeny bee they have to pay for the auto charges for the auto turbine and maybe some grid charges and then the net amount they transfer to the Auroville unity fund and the Auroville unity fund credits then everybody with some amount which reduces electricity bill but my point is it's green money it's not green electricity it is green yeah I mean in fact the dollar is also green no so it's green money if you want to call it green money I mean some of us feel but that we don't want to debate here but some of us feel that it would I personally feel that that money which is earned we should also invest in more renewable energy assets rather than everybody getting maybe a lower electricity bill because then you make itself supporting but that is a separate topic we don't want to bring it up here yes please I have a small question to that graph that you can you go back to the graph it's quite interesting like how for the four substation what is that peak I'm just curious what is that peak at 4.15 yeah I think that morning peak I've also been wondering is it the water heater peak or what is what it is I have a feeling it's matrimandir because I have a feeling that all the sprinklers go on and the lights go on it's just a combination it is some pumps are starting some people are water heating water heaters are starting you know they have what is 4.15 in the morning you know people may have programmed it that it starts at 4.15 so it is already at 6 o'clock when they want to take a bath I don't know but my simple point is this peak is a combination of two three factors we also have a 9.30 peak if you see now of course not because the solar cancels it but earlier there would be a 9.30 10 peak is when the offices start and the air conditioners are being put on so in fact we can have this life I mean we don't want to do it now but we can live see right now what is happening he has access to it but the evening peak is also quite high I find I find for all of you the evening peak at 1920 if you see here is a peak which is it which is about 300 kilowatt I find that high I mean the how steep it goes up so that is of course you're switching on the lights and maybe some televisions and maybe some induction so cooking so the whole idea is that you want to flatten those peaks because don't forget another important detail you always have to design the capacity of the systems to be able to handle the peak if you can flatten the peak all your transformer sizes cable sizes switch gear sizes all can come down right so peak shaving is a very important part of the whole story it's interesting to see that you should check out matrimon if you can reduce that which one the sprinklers yeah I mean it's amazing sprinklers are not very much energy intensive anyway yeah anyway the other question I had was that solar what is it what you fund solar pool how do you what are your priorities like how do you decide where you're going to put the next oh it is very simple they have made a list of all what we call the public buildings first so so we keep above on unity pavilion all buildings which are public first and then some residential buildings have been approached schools everywhere the priority right now is to put it in the area which is connected to the high tension I mean our internal grit for a simple reason because then it can migrate to other parts of all of them if you put it on a low tension individual TV TV connection the surplus goes to TV and the compensation for that is very very low so the priority is to put the new solar systems within the city area where we are all connected to one connection which is just behind the 86 you can see it here 86 so that it stays within the fence so to say a little bit spillover is there on a few days in the month you are spilling over to TV right we are trimming it 20 to 30 units that's symbolic so we have a bit of a spillover but then of course when the spillover threatens to become higher then you put storage and then instead of spilling it over into the public rich you spill it over in your own connecting now increasing it yes and last question are you going to present how you phasing out the overhead tension lines from Auroville like you want to change the substations that's coming in the next next presentation because I'm thinking about also electromagnetic fields it's good to reduce that by putting in the ground yes and we also don't lose so much land because always these trees and cutting and pruning and it's a lot of maintenance next presentation we will show you how this whole overhead jungle has been replaced by an underground system you'll be so happy to see that thank you we have already said this among us few times there are many similarities between the energy and the water scenario in terms of strategy in terms of source in terms of storage I mean the principles and the mechanisms are very much similar what is a bit worrying is that increase in consumption because I remember a few years ago there was a presentation where it was said it will naturally come down and I really trusted that that would happen but actually when I see this graph it's a bit worrisome why because if I make a parallel with the water the moment we will achieve the water security actually the water abundance if we put in place a certain measure and then we want to be a beacon for others then we should always remember that that graph should never go increasingly high but it should be with consciousness of consumption an example for the others so it would be very much interesting my point of view but I think also in the collective to understand if it's possible what are the mechanisms which are implying that higher consumption thank you I am fully with you you have seen it it's almost a doubling from 2012 and definitely I mean the scheme of free electricity has contributed to this 100% what happened is people started purchasing air conditioners which were not always the most efficient ones so that whole scheme we also may have one day to look into what are the measures what electrical service already does if they see a sudden increase in somebody's house or think they give them an alert and in fact they even go there to find out what's happening if they may be the air conditioner on with the window open or stuff like that but what I believe when we worked with Lavender on sector 1 and sector 2 when they prepared the DDP we gave them inputs for an energy strategy where we said you should have an energy budget like you have a financial budget how many kilowatt hours per person on average do we want to budget for it is not that everyone will consume the same amount of energy but on average so if you say for example that including what is it called a e-mobility and e-cooking suppose it comes down to 3000 because e-cooking is a big ticket item and we talk about those LPG bottles but if you start replacing them also suppose it turns out to be 3000 I'm not saying it is but suppose then that becomes your energy budget and then we have to inform the community listen we are going to generate a population multiplied by 3000 not one kilowatt hour more right and then we have to do load shedding if it goes above it has to be a collective awareness campaign you can today you can get equipment which is super efficient and sometimes people have not against but hesitate to do it because the upfront capital cost is sometimes a bit more but in most cases you can demonstrate within 2-3 years that extra capital cost is already paid back so more awareness have to be done and as far as the DDPs are concerned my recommendation would be to include in the DDPs an energy strategy and an energy budget and then maybe the target can be achieved this is not a good trend at all this increasing yes please so I think one more questions and then we are going to go to the other presentation ok so then 2 because Omar insists thank you Tuan for that presentation full of numbers one thought is that is it possible to also think of a limited production of power like not totally put all our eggs in solar but when solar goes down can we also think of some push button technologies like biomass generation, biogas generation so they can dampen the peak in the more detailed document of which this is a summary we have written that there should be diversification of sources as well solar is an easy one to do because you have rooftop but definitely biomass should be another one we have even looked at micro wind for all of you it is a border case because you have a bit of wind typically in the evenings that sea breeze but it does not make a case yet to do in a big way micro wind there is now an American company that is in touch with one of our colleagues who says you know I will at my course demonstrate that it will work so if that person is still up to it we will put a few micro wind turbines and so definitely it has to be diversified you cannot put all your eggs in one basket even if that basket is solar okay thank you toan for the presentation I told you I have very little knowledge of the meticulous data of electricity but the concept of clustering is honestly very sound to me because in the area of bioclimatic design this is where the world is going today we recognize that thinking of building by building doesn't work much we find that some buildings in one cluster generate heat while other buildings need heat and then becomes how and I remember some professor was telling imagine all of this heat coming from the metro stations in London is there is a way to use it so this is very sound to me so now the main question is now you have 22 architects who are working on dream weaving for the crown how this can be clustered there is one cluster or you see it as the specific range of distance that has to be respected and then if you are giving recommendations what kind of the architects are working on the level of geometry and form is there is any recommendation that they could think this is what we call integrative design that the engineers and the architects are since they want interacting is there is any recommendation are there any recommendations that you can in which they can implement very good so you will see in the next presentation that when the electricity master plan was prepared we instructed the consultant the development consultant we don't want any transformer size above 250 kva see there is always a trend to put big transformers and fewer of them we said we want to penetrate into the urban fabric with high tension more to have long term benefit of reduced energy losses and voltage drops and they accepted that so one way to do it is a transformer level so a transformer is a cluster you could also say a transformer have three clusters and then integrate at switchboard level the nice thing about it is you can be as flexible as you want to be you can have a small cluster, big cluster, medium cluster you can have one transformer is one cluster you can have two transformers as a cluster is just a question of basic engineering so the answer is the detailed development planners can just inform the technical team how they want to do the planning and it can adopt to it it can be for example in this case I think it is one transformer am I correct so in this case it is cluster wise transformer wise in the town hall but you could if you have a larger area where one transformer for the time being till the density improves having long cable length you could say okay I put a cluster here and I put a cluster there the idea is that you see for years together in workshops like this there used to be always two camps so one camp used to say centralized and the other camp would say decentralized and they would also sit more or less like this one on the left and one on the right so we have thrown both of these words out of the window long ago it is neither centralized nor it is decentralized it is distributed but connected distributed but connected and the same thing but water you would harvest the water maybe in many many points but you want to connect so we don't talk anymore in terms of centralized versus decentralized distributed and connected so we are going to the next presentation now Wanga, Paketla you do the HD I will do the LT how are we doing on time by the way are we okay or so it is now 5.20 almost so we were supposed to be one on our hours totally so you are supposed to be done by 6 okay now we will do that faster so you have 40 something minutes okay we can do this see basically in the early days of Auroville we were even less dense than we are today very low density a building here, a building there a community here, a community there and there was never any money for infrastructure so what was the simple thing to do you asked the teeny bee to bring an overhead line those overhead lines for certain categories would be free also if you had more than two connections the overhead line would come for free so you take for example sincerity community there were four houses you apply for three connections four poles free of cost we knew we both knew that this cannot last very long this has to stop because it became a spaghetti or what would be another in your menu what would be the equivalent to spaghetti in Egypt what is the equivalent to spaghetti also spaghetti so it became spaghetti without a very good sauce by the way so we said it was there was an organic unplanned growth and quite frankly the architects also they said I don't want to hear about it just give me a water connection I don't care from where give me an electrical connection I don't care from where and give me a telephone connection I don't care from where that was the system in those days not only that they were not planning no the plan was for a particular building and then once the building is completed they will come to me for getting a connection they will not even tell us that the building is going to come in this area and you have to plan for a overhead line or a TNEP connection the building will be totally completed then they will come for an electric connection so we have to apply and then see with the TNEP how to bring the overhead line to that location so it became something like this I mean this is still a mild version you know a complete web of lines going high tension line low tension lines there were also earlier telephone lines BSNL was having overhead lines for every telephone 2 GA wires so if you have 20 telephone lines you have 40 wires it was a complete mess the problem with overhead lines also is let us say there is an overhead line going from here to there to an out of the building and a private party who owns a land just 200 meters away says hey the line has come pretty close now now I also apply even if tomorrow we would decide to get rid of the overhead lines the cost of that one private party you cannot remove it the entire transformer cannot be removed transformer high tension line cannot be removed for just one party so both of us saw this coming quite some time ago we said this is going in the wrong direction completely we have to do something about it this was what happened after TANE already was mentioned in the introduction 150 poles came down 3 transformer structures and we were in the field for 3 weeks we snapped like twigs we got help from a lot of people in fact a friend of mine who was working in Kalpakkam he sent 2 JCBs we got equipment from so many people we worked with TNEB closely together we did also some work outside of Auroville with TNEB to get the whole region up we even got the chairman of the more electricity board to help us he came here so that vision I have already shared with you so we don't have to repeat a quick reminder for especially for OMAR that in electricity say power P is voltage multiplied by current P is V into I so a particular quantity of electricity you can transfer from A to B either with a high voltage or a low current or a high current and a low voltage so what is typically done is that when you transport over a long distance which is called transmission you have it at a higher voltage and a lower current because high current means big conductors and the losses in the cable or a line are I square, current squared multiplied by the resistance so if you have double the current you have 4 times the losses so normally when you transport over a longer distance you like to have the voltage to be high and that's why transmission lines are 2 30 kilo volts 1 10 400 then you have 11 distribution and finally you have what you get in your plug 2 30 volts so that's why in now these are the standard voltages normally used in India which are 6 30 400 2 30 110 60 6 30 3 11 and then the LT is of course 230 single phase and 4 15 3 phase the last one is what you are dealing with when you are in your house the problem that we have in this particular area is that there is a voltage which is not standard used by the TB which is 22,000 volts 22 KV non-standard non-standard, Pondicherry also had it they have replaced most of it with 11, Jipma still has it multi-output is in the process of being of being changed so when you have a 22 kilo volts system when you purchase a 22 kilo volts switch you are actually purchasing a 33 kilo volts switch with a 22 kilo volt label on it so you are paying too much and it is much bigger so we had wanted for the last 20 years plus to get a whole system changed to 11 kilo volts from 22 at one point in 2009 the TB also realized that they would like to do not just for our view but for the whole area so they were saying they were telling us you give us two acres of land and we will put a one 10 by 11 kilo volts substation and everyone in this area we removed 22 and put 11 So the transformer cost and the line cost and the switchboard cost all that will be reduced to not even half much less Unfortunately Auroville for some internal process reasons could not agree on to give those two acres of land so that idea was dropped they came back with another proposal to have a different type of land it is a long story finally finally two three years ago when again we told them look we want 11 KV they said listen we have come to the conclusion that in any case we want to build a substation there because the Eurombi substation is getting heavily overloaded so if you gave us two acres of land now we will build a one 10 by 22 by 11 so in other words there will be a one 10 income there will be about four feeders 22 for the villages around and we can give you an 11 KV feeder provided to pay for it they were no longer interested to convert the area into 11 because they could not they could not manage the cost of all the changing all the transformers as you know teeny bee is in a very bad financial position so the two acres was given leased out to them for near a danger they have started to work so the idea is basically they built a substation one 10 incoming 22 KV four feeders out for village loads and one feeder for us the work has been stopped because some landowners are objecting to the towers coming into the land most of the towers come on our land but if you come on private land so that dispute is being taken care of or being discussed now negotiated so here you can see why also from a cost perspective the migration to 11 KV is very interesting I mean you take a transformer same 250 KV 11 KV would cost you 8 lakhs and 22 KV and same thing for switch gear and cables so there is a very strong case to go for 11 KV so we decided then we recommended to the TTC listen guys whether you have your DDPs ready or not we need an electricity plan we cannot keep giving at-hoc connections mix of overhead lines and cables going here and there so a tender was written for doing this plan and it was won by a company in Calcutta called Development Consultants Limited we were quite happy that they won the tender because the chairman the late chairman, Mr. Dutt was also a devotee and used to come to Martimel and they did it at a very reasonable price so they prepared a plan with us together all the way till 50,000 people but designed in such a way that you can implement it in small steps so it has an HD plan it has an LT plan it has a road and street lighting plan it has got phasing the phasing is of course taken from the master plan of Auroville, 5, 15, 25 and 50 it comes to basically a distribution capacity of almost 1 KW per person now you will be wondering is that not low, yeah it is low but you always have to look at diversity factors it's not that everyone has all the road on all the time with a capacity need of almost a KW per person so 11 KV will be the distribution voltage not 22 now the question was how do we get now 11 at that time we were wondering how do we get one option was you convert you take a 22 KV income out and you step it down to 11 then all the transformer losses will come to Auroville's account and in any case once we cross 5 MW we have to again migrate to 110 KV then you become a 110 KV consumer so we looked at various options I won't bother you with the details but basically let me go straight away to that conclusion this was plan 1 so we have 22 we keep the 22 of teeny bee till they change and we step it down ourselves option 1 option 2 was we have dual ratio transformers so they can be switched over from and we have done initially this particular option the first 4 or 5 transformers had this but then we came ourselves after the master plan was already completed with an option 3 which was that we heard several times that teeny bee was interested in building a substation for other reasons than Auroville also so we said listen if we can engage with them then maybe we can accelerate to the 11 KV and that's what is happening now with the new substation ultimately by the way once we cross about 5 MW I think it's 5 MW then we have to become a 110 KV consumer and then we can build our own 110 by 11 nice indoor substation very compact that is of course to be done at some point of time also we briefed the DCL we had a very by the way we had a very nice constructive interaction it was not a typical consultant-client relationship in fact they wrote a very nice letter when they were done that they picked up a lot of nice ideas from Auroville which they are implementing later for example this idea of 250 KV as a limit initially they said no no why 250 500 KV game minimum 750 KV so we convinced them that initially the capital cost is a bit higher because if I put two transformers of 250 rather than one of 500 I have an initial capital cost which is a bit higher but we could convince them with simple calculations that reduction in energy losses etc would pay it back in a couple of years so they got completely convinced have you installed any transformers beyond 250 KV? no I just want to check before I commit so he has electrical service is not going beyond 250 KV so if the load is 500 it will become 2 times 250 one here and one there so you bring the high tension just tremendously and the cable size also we have not gone more than 150 185 or 185 so basically the main features of that electrical plan are there is a high tension ring that high tension ring will be 11 KV now for the time being it is 22 it has a total cross section of 600 square millimetre aluminium but we are doing it in two steps right now one cable is almost late of 300 square mm on one side of the crown and the other one will be late later why do we do that? first of all it is very difficult to justify financially that you invest now for 50,000 people in a ring second thing is having two cables instead of one gives you more resilience if tomorrow one cable would fail you can do a bit of load shedding you can still feed the essential loads so finally if this is the crown there will be one high tension cable on this side and one on that side it is now a 22 KV cable but you can operate of course a 22 KV cable at 11 KV not the other way around so basically how would it work? you have a ring and then you go along the radios you penetrate into the urban fabric I mean these are just illustrative only I don't think it would be literally like this as the town grows that is the nice thing about it suppose the TDC decides to focus on sector one and sector two of the residential zone which is actually designed for 8,000 people sorry 5,000 people then that radio will be done first along with the spur lines going from the radio so you can keep on building on it but of course the ring on which you build is like the foundation of a building that has to be designed straight away now for half and later for the full when the second cable is made so you keep on doing that and then finally we always have a moment of tension whether it fits or not does it fit? ah my god what a relief so this is what you basically do and you connect it of course to the outside world at least at one or two places again for the reason which I gave earlier that you don't want to become an island with enormous amount of storage now maybe this is basically the summary so two connections to the outside world finally an interconnection at 110 kV level when we cross a certain population transformers are all indoor healthy underground cables ah so no more overhead lines all gone energy efficient systems because of this design we get a very low I square R losses the grid is fed from all the grid connected renewable energy systems as I explained in the earlier presentation they can export to each other and import from each other the buildings and the clusters all the meters that electrical service installs are all bi-directional meters for those who know what a bi-directional meter is so they are solar ready and there is by the way no cost difference between the so called unidirectional and bi-directional meter it is only the manufacturers who want you to believe but we have they understand that we understand that there is no difference so we get bi-directional meters unidirectional meter they do energy metering audits online already we have March 21 we have 400 kW of solar up and running off grid in the green belt by the way I forgot completely to mention that sorry for that in the green belt there are a lot of stand alone systems stand alone systems I think you must be on stand alone Alan so that means not grid connected battery bank solar and the battery has to take you through did you have any problem with that do you think of rain or not so it means you have a good battery bank quite a big one and Mona conversion of TDB over headlines to underground how many service connections have you cancelled of TDB we have cancelled about 565 service connections cancelled means over headline connections all taken out and all merged into one high-tension connection whole of Bharat Nevas area has been completely removed whole of Mataramandir residential zone up to admin area we have completely removed all the over headlines all the transformers of TDB we have our own underground cable and our own distribution transformers in 5 different locations our own transformers which are giving supply by AC number 86 the connection is right there so it is now a 22 KAB connection and from there it distributes through the ring to the whole of Auroville so what has been done till now energy plan and future installations was done in 2003 the code of practice has been written and has been updated every 2 years it's a code of practice that we have ourselves designed which is of course taking into account the statutory provisions but we go a bit beyond it we do a bit better if I may use that word and then the electrical master plan so what are the clusters already included Mataramandir we have included Bharat Nevas visitor center whole of nursery we have center field area language lab and Bharat Nevas the admin zone completely we have covered the residential zone we have covered almost up to seditude few more service connection is left to be connected all the rest is connected to one HD service connection so the advantage of doing this is that we got rid of the overhead lines but as I mentioned in the earlier presentation we can now transport energy solar energy, renewable energy from one cluster to the other cluster over our own network of course the maintenance work is also very minimal now we don't have much maintenance like we used to send three teams at a time to attend the overhead line fault now we have got only one team to attend the underground cable system so this is what is planned for in 2022-23 the teeny-bee substation that is fully in dear control we have nothing to do with it we hope that they can overcome this problem then we have to build a receiving station next to it to receive the 11KV from them and then through one of the radios it has to be taken to the ring so clusters that will be included in 2021-22 and 2022-23 are visitor center and then we have industrial zone Mona, your area you are still in overhead lines yes this famous topic of the right way I think Toby is going to give a presentation in one of the sessions on the whole infrastructure so I don't want to go deep into it but it is so important that these underground services are late in the right place from the beginning it is almost impossible and if it is possible extremely expensive to tell for example after an high tension cable late to say sorry actually it should have been late there it is just impossible so that's why this right of way clearing is not just to clear it but to also physically see ok here it is coming because there could even be a genuine error of a new survey coming to the site and he says yes you can build a storeroom here he checks and yeah go ahead and the person builds the storeroom and the next surveyer who comes who knows his job better says so even to avoid genuine errors if the right of ways are cleared and on both sides the infrastructure is properly installed what we have done by the way we have put for every service a sub corridor so if the corridor is say this much there is high tension at 1 meter 20 low tension at 70 centimeter water at 50 and they also have a horizontal clearance sometimes people ask me but why are you doing all this if you look at Pondicherry narrow state they manage all these cables in just this much of pavement the truth is that those were organically grown Pondicherry had overhead telephone overhead electricity and sewage was not even there was an open drain so once they decided to go underground they simply opened whatever they could open and put the cables on top of each other we are not going to do that because we have a plant city so we can do it properly to have each service having its own unique sub corridor you don't want the guy from telephones to puncture an high tension cable or vice versa you don't want a water guy to puncture the electrical cable or vice versa so each this was an exercise which was done in 13-14 with all the infrastructure services of all of them together and we studied all sorts of standards from different countries Australia western Europe United States and we came to a standard that we say okay this is the standard that we have to do to have clearance and to have reliable systems in most cases you can do it under the pavement if you have a pedestrian pavement if you take most of the west European countries they have to carry its way and they have you know for pedestrians they have or cycles they have on two sides these pay for blocks which in the case the country where I come from is just a 30 by 30 centimeter concrete slab and you remove them when you want to go and you put it back but it has to be a dedicated corridor you don't want all this stuff to be thrown on top of each other in a very messy way I was once in church gate in Bombay and the road was open and it also has organically grown in Calcutta they even started with DC first direct current and then they it's a complete mess there so that is not going in that direction let us plan it properly so that it also can be maintained properly we are going to do by the way don't worry but this is a typical one of those cross sections that we studied from one of the countries I don't remember which one how each service has got a dedicated subcordidour dedicated depth and dedicated width and there are drawings so when for example a contractor is called by the government to repair an LT cable he knows exactly where to dig and you know 90 percent chance that he actually will find that cable there and there is a rule in some of these countries but he finds it 10 centimeter to the left he has to report that to the cadastre where they were updated the data bank so this is how it is typically done very often the storm water drain or the sewage is even under the road because there you never have to go back to that's permanent these are usually these big concrete pipes with you know manholes every so many meters but all the other services will have to be accessible for repair upgradation replacement etc etc so the role definition the TDC releases the layouts the overall service does the marking and clearing and the infrastructure install in the dedicated I think this we have already covered in the separate presentation so I don't want to repeat you see the wind is also there but in our case that is remote and my last point is that if you want to be a lot of people use this term smart grid it's very fashionable in our view is smart grid this is not a smart grid this is the conventional grid where there is a one-way flow of energy from big power stations to millions of consumers the smart grid is this where there are multi-directional feeders you know the highway is no longer a one-way highway it is a network and thanks God thank God that the electrical cables and wires are much more flexible than this they don't carry care whether the electricity flows from left to right or right to left so they are quite happy to you know okay you come this way that way no issue at all you have to switch some switch gear might have to be changed some relays but you can make the existing grid into this with not too much of intervention this we have already covered this is a typical grid connected rooftop solar system energy storage we have covered in the previous one very important ingredient smart smart grid we have already covered also and I think this also we have covered and then we thank you 1744 Hi my name is Raj I have seen some cross sections where the service are heavily driven driving the design of the pathways or the roads which we are about to design so my question is we are putting so much importance to these electrical, telephone cable data just want to come back in my lifetime I grow up in a gober gas light not only just gober gas light then I switch to my family switch to electricity then now I am on completely off the grid which I leave in a green belt so my question is changing fast so we are designing for the future and tomorrow how relevant is it today we are putting so much energy into designing these structures they are all ultimately design our roads and so forth so how important is that to concentrate on yeah you see normally it should be done the other way around as I explained a little bit earlier normally you would have the DDPs ready and then the infrastructure follows the DDPs but quite frankly you failed to prepare DDPs and at the same time there were people living here who wanted water electricity and communication so the infrastructure to delete we put the cart before the horse and I hope that with this exercise which is going to happen now that the horse comes back in front of the cart now whether you go for renewable energy standalone or not you need some services to be underground what you normally should do is that you first make a calculation what do I need for mobility you don't talk about infrastructure what do I need for mobility so do I need two lanes that makes maybe 6.6 meters width do I need a cycle path or not then you add it all up and then you add the same thing you do the same adding up for the services if the services are more than that width then you have to sit can we do something about it or you say okay then we go for the highest of the two so unfortunately what has happened with the mobility study this morning unfortunately a lot of studies have never been converted into plans they remain studies on a shelf in the office so if now some of these studies with the help of the first issue organization become actually plans then hence forward the infrastructure services can work with those plans nobody likes to do infrastructure first and planning after so and by the way the only thing that electrical service is doing but now is only laying the cable for the backbone which is needed for the town whichever DDP comes DDP cables if I may call them have not been installed because a DDP cable means for example if you go from the transformer into sector 1 we have no clue what that cable size has to be unless the DDP is prepared what is being done today on the crown and one or two one radio only is what we call in our language the backbone which irrespective of what the DDP is coming out that backbone is needed and in the case of the high tension cable as I explained only 50% of the backbone right now so we do hope that the horse will come back in front of the cart that it is let by DDP planning and not by infrastructure planning so what basis for example will the electrical service decide that from the Vika's radio into sector 1 and 2 what size of cable they have to put they have no clue so when people put pressure and some of the architects put pressure Poonazami I am going to build a house there I want a cable now I don't care about the future then what will you do then he may put a cable which is 2 times of what is needed so he can manage another 5 houses so how in advance that that house is part of a cluster which is connected to feeder pillar number 22 feeder pillar number 22 is connected to transformer 5 and then it is just a question of from the feeder pillar to lay a correct cable to that particular house that is missing today so I would request all the architects and planners please put that horse back in front of the cart we will feel much more comfortable and the stand alone if you have time I will sit with you separately I can't say I will convince you but I will be able to tell you that if you get connected to a cluster like this because you see sometimes people in Orville also are against the wrong thing don't be against cables or wires be against the electron that goes through it which is maybe black or grey but a wire or a cable is just connecting stuff it's like you can't be against roads you can be against the traffic on the road so stand alone has a lot of disadvantages in fact we did a study once of the Greenbelt stand alone systems the cost per kilowatt hour compared with the cluster system it came four or five times cost per kilowatt hour so we will sit separately so part of my question is already answered it was about the DDP being there first and the infrastructure how does that work but what I see you have answered that maybe the electrical service is something to do but my question is also what I saw very relevant in your sections and your examples was what would come on top of the cables for it to be accessed easily would that also not be a part of the DDP which will help you find the exact location of the cables so even right now when it talks about the backbone isn't right now not having the DDP to even lay the backbone is also a constraint for you to not have the exact location and exact you know the detail of what's going to come on top of where the cable is being laid see the backbone is being laid as of now along right over which which are mentioned in the master plan itself we call them master plan right over which is the crown and the radios no other cables are being laid except in some communities along paths what the DDP will tell us suppose they make a DDP of the residential zone five sectors in each sector there will be clusters the DDP planners will tell us per cluster what is the expected load expected consumption and then they will also tell us how will people go say from the radio to that cluster the paths and the internal roads and all that then the routing of the cable becomes that path and the size of the cable becomes that load see cables, pipes always have to be laid along a path or a road so that you can always access them it makes no sense to have the road here and the cable 20 meters further on in the bush bush you have to be able to go there in case of high tension cables you have to go there even with a big equipment and a big drum etc so accessibility for repair, maintenance, up gradation replacement is a must and that's why all over the world these services are always laid on both sides of the mobility corridor so if the DDP defines where the mobility corridor comes the infrastructure has no choice but to go along that so the routing gets decided by the mobility corridors and sizing gets decided by the loads same thing for water same thing for internet same thing for waste waste water, everything I have a question regarding you had explained something the other day and when we met last Monday that you see the infrastructure corridor is something fixed on the crown now I'm talking that's fixed but you said something that the road can move but the infrastructure corridor has to be this perfect circle what I have understood we have received the cross section drawing from the TDC the last version was was February 2020 is the last version that the TDC distributed to the infrastructure service they had a September 2016 version and they had before that some 11 version the last version shows a carriageway of 6.7 of which the center line is that famous 690 from the Benin tree and that carriageway is a perfect circle but the space on both sides of the 6.7 is not equal on one side it is more on one side it is less on one side there is a cycle path and on the other side there is not and on one side there are more services so the services have gone below the cycle path that is the reason so if the TDC changes it look for infrastructure is very simple it has to be accessible at any given time and you have to be able to access it quickly like if the cable fails now within one hour they have to be able to go and inside and see what happens the possibility is there the infrastructure services will not bother much moreover it has to be approved by the electrical inspector it has to be next to the road obviously it cannot be anywhere else my point was then what I have understood now after you then you wouldn't have anything against if we all decide then from the infrastructure point of view then if there is a slight bend there if 30 meters or 20 meters we will be seeing it is just a few meters because I have already laid the cable there I think that topic you should discuss when the overall this is a discussion on electricity so I don't want to get into those details I have a lot of personal views on it which I will not share now because this meeting was meant for electricity and energy but Toby is doing a session on the overall infrastructure and then you can discuss that you can also ask questions of what happens to the mobility part of it let's not discuss that now I am talking about the cable the cable is always on both sides not only the cable in Dharkali what has been laid was laid before 3-4 years and now there is some change in the survey and so it is not really where it is supposed to be what we saw in fact in several places another example is Tensi's place when he was laying the cable he was told you don't put it here you put it there so there are some stretches again a lot of cost what will have to be done is a new cable will have to be laid and the old one has to be removed and used somewhere else that's why I said once and for all you decide where the infrastructure comes and don't change it changing is extremely expensive if a cable along the crown goes like this and there is a T-junction to a transformer can you imagine what it means to shift that cable and the whole transformer connection and the switch gear it is just totally crazy so we have been demanding from all the TDCs of the past you can DDP forever but freeze the infrastructure corridors where they will come how much will come what size that will be DDP dependent in the same way with mobility if you look at for example the same narrow street example narrow street at one time was horse carts then it was one way traffic two way traffic no traffic but where the mobility takes place is always frozen what type of mobility may evolve I have lived in Pune for a few years MG wrote in Pune while I was there became in the weekends pedestrian only street two way became one way traffic so the what you cannot change you see once you fix a right of way and there is building on this side broad on the road right you can only make it narrower so that is something you cannot play with all the rest you can play with so our request from the infrastructure service for years has been I don't prepare the DDPs and the DDPs include infrastructure if you are not doing that at least decide where it will come because we have a population living here at once electricity, water and internet 24 by 7 so it is basically we will put that ball back in the court of the planners quite frankly I am going to be very blunt the infrastructure was more proactive than the planners because the infrastructure said we have to stop this TNB story of indivisible connections poles, spaghetti etc and the planners could not come to an agreement to plan and I think now the dream weaving is trying to bring everybody together and take the plan forward get the horse in front of the cart that is all I am asking the cart will go also in the right carriage way 5 minutes so we have Julio and Omar I guess my main question is not going to be answered so I will ask something else because I know that Twain you are talking always about clearing the right of way for all the radials and the ring road and everything but what is your timeline when you are really laying the HD cable under the radials and the outer ring road that depends on the DDPs see DDPs have a what factor and a when factor so if the what is clear it determines what has to be laid and when the when factor is clear it will tell when it is to be laid that is called phasing in the morning when Srivastava presented he talked about phasing which was asked maybe by you that or by somebody else about his implementation look when you implement suppose we say we want to add 5000 beds houses for 5000 people then you need also educational facilities health facilities you cannot say I put in the residential so on 5000 houses so all this has to be interconnected so suppose we say 5000 then the education people will say we have calculated that with this 5000 and this type of a demography we need so many more schools at that time Pune Swami cannot say oh sorry I forgot to lay a backbone to the educational zone so you have to wait 5 years so you make a backbone also so that when the zonal development takes place that you don't have to reinvent the wheel then then you only have to connect from the main backbone into the zones that is the whole idea of a backbone if out of you it didn't have the zones and if everything would be in one place it would be a bit easier but today you have to have zonal balancing you have to have economic activities for 5000 people you have to have educational activities for 5000 people so the implementation question of this morning I would have added to what Srivastava said has to be a balanced implementation and by the way this right of way was not only by me all the infrastructure service of out of you out of you have been asking for it we have something like 25 letters signed by everyone Chandrash, Luca that please, please, please define this always we get to a mess there are still a lot of cables by the way in out of you and you have gone today on a crown walk I will take you on another walk where there are storerooms cycle sheds houses on top of cables and pipes you can never get there we don't want that and who is going to pay for all this so you want to lay them straight away where they belong that's all we are asking yes no I am actually agreeing with one on the issue of the horse has to come in front of the cart and I feel like this is a good end for this because it shows it gives a sense of the duty on the shoulders of all the planners and the architects because this is the mission of the moment right because the issue of a right of way is quite complex I wish it was as simple as infrastructure it includes bio-climatic factors you could make the wrong decision and you end up with much degrees higher in a city it includes water issues as we have seen with Julia today it includes several systems connecting and to work on this complexity I don't even think only the architects it has to be the architects with the engineers with the because this is the integrative design process and just we have to be careful while working on the ground because we could cause problems and at the same time feel the responsibility to quickly start getting something to convincing so we avoid these problems in the future the physical infrastructure has to serve the social infrastructure if you do not design the social infrastructure the physical infrastructure starts having its own life on its own makes no sense I have been in meetings with where they ask me for advice that look we have an application from architect so and so to connect so and so building and there is no DDP what cable size do we put so we make almost a wild guess well it is probably in the next five years so and so other buildings may come there so let's go for 95 sq it's a totally illogical irrational decision you take so please get the DDPs on paper okay it's now two minutes past six Julia has a question it's okay so first day is over tomorrow we start at eight with Olivier who's going to talk about economy in the city and then we have Iceland our worry culture we open forestry and then the team of the line of Goodwill I still don't know who's going to talk and followed by Lata who's going to talk about regional context so please be here at eight I mean five minutes before eight thank you