About Auroville

Multifarious activities
Auroville is intended as a city for up to 50,000 inhabitants from around the world. Today its inhabitants number around 1,500 people, drawn from some thirty countries. They live in 100 settlements of varying size, separated by village and temple lands and surrounded by Tamil villages with a total population of over 35,000 people. Their activities are multifarious, and include afforestation, organic agriculture, educational research, health care, village development, appropriate technology, and building construction, information technology, small and medium scale businesses, town planning, water table management, cultural activities and community services.

Renewable energy at Auroville
The first solar panels were installed in Auroville in the early eighties. Today, Auroville has more than 150 houses fully powered by photovoltaic panels and about 50 houses that use solar power in conjunction with a state grid connection. Some communities run solely on solar and wind energy. The total standalone photovoltaic energy capacity of Auroville is more than 15% of the total photovoltaic capacity in India.

Solar energy in Auroville is used mainly for home lighting systems, pumping water for drinking purposes and irrigation, heating water for domestic purposes, and food processing. Other solar applications developed are solar curing chambers for ferrocement prefabricated elements and solar concentrators.

Products
The Sustainable Village is helping Imagination market their yoga mats. They're made from 100% cotton (They do not make synthetic ones), and come with a matching shoulder bag. They also produce yoga cushions or pillows as a matching accessory and have two categories of mats. There is the pure cotton power loomed product and the pure cotton hand loomed variety. It is the scale and volume of order that determines which type of loom we use. The Handloom, by it's very nature, has a production volume constraint. They reserve this for those customers whose offtake quantity is limited and who are also willing to pay the price differential this entails. Hand loomed products as a rule are labor intensive. This, combined with low production turnouts (owing to time and detail) makes this relatively more expensive than it's power loom counterpart. Hand looming represents a certain pre-industrial purity where the human hand, imagination and a wooden loom were the sole instruments of creation.
Power looming, in contrast, is a mechanized process that eliminates human intermediaries at different levels in order to meet increasing demands efficiently. Increased production volumes make it possible to reduce unit cost. They employ two modes of dyeing as well. There is the synthetic one, where we use conventional dyes BUT which are free from toxic elements. These are called AZO FREE dyes, synthetic yet benign.

The other kind of dye we use is natural vegetable based dyes extracted from plant parts-root, bark, leaf, etc.These are either prepared by us or procured from those who specialize in the extraction of such natural coloring agents. Just for your information, the Indigo plant (indigo tinctoria) is indigenous to these parts where we live and work. Unfortunately though, owing to falling prices (and this because of increased production in the past few years), many local farmers are discontinuing indigo cultivation and seeking more profitable alternatives. Such are the vicissitudes of a global economy. It is a double edged sword it seems. Now that you have the backdrop, let's move to the queries. They take every pain to ensure that all our orders match client requirements and specifications. In the unlikely event that there is an accident, they take the responsibility to redeem this.

Environmental soundness
Imagination is located in the international township of Auroville. We are almost on the fringes of a handful of local settlements that is home to the Tamil people, long time settlers of these parts. A vast majority of them eke out a subsistence living from agriculture, the economic mainstay of this region.

They have with us almost 30 full time individuals, both men and women, who we have trained in weaving, dyeing, designing and tailoring. Additionally, we train from time to time, small groups who have a penchant for such near obsolete crafts such as handloom weaving. They would like to think that these will somehow keep this torch alive for some more time to come. Wherever possible they try to keep such groups going by contracting piece work out to them. They invest unstintingly on worker welfare and upgradation of techniques and skills, trying always to uphold the delicate man-environment relationship in the process, despite the pressures they find themselves under both economic and social.

The buildings that house their workshops, training areas and offices are indeed ecofriendly to say the least. These buildings, with the exception of our warehouse, are all made from locally available materials such as palm and coconut thatch. This, though difficult to maintain owing to degradation and scarcity, is still preferred by us. It gives a rural character to our workplace and is the best thing for our tropical climate - 40 degrees C plus in summer with torrential monsoon rains. We can send you some pictures of our establishment.

Their handlooms depend only upon human motive power whereas the power looms run on conventional electricity. Unlike in the developed world alternative energy sources like solar or wind power is still in it's infancy here and very expensive to procure and run. They are nevertheless on the lookout for any alternative system that we could obtain within our means.