Govardhan Ecovillage in India started with five people on five acres. Today it has about 300 residents and welcomes around a million visitors a year. Mohan, one of Govardhan’s long-time members, shared the story and the lessons behind it in a recent GENOA Ecovillage Talk.
Trust first, buildings later
The story began in 2003, with a tiny group, a biogas plant, some cows and the motto “simple living, high thinking.” The first seven years were about relationships, not construction. They ran mobile medical vans to nearby villages and worked on malnutrition and education. That patience paid off. “People realize you don’t have a personal, political, commercial agenda. You actually mean well for society.” Building began in 2010, and the ecovillage opened to visitors in 2016.
Working with water and waste
The region receives around 3,000 mm of rain a year, yet farmers face drought, because the fractured basalt beneath cannot hold water. So the team began with a hydrogeological survey and rainwater harvesting, and taught neighbouring farmers to do the same. Farmers now build shared ponds and keep a register of who uses how much. As water returned, so did biodiversity, including migratory birds that brought rare seeds.
The goal is a fully circular system. Food and farm waste become compost, animal waste becomes biogas, wastewater is treated with soil biotechnology developed at IIT Bombay, and waste plastic is turned back into oil through closed-loop pyrolysis. Around 100 guest rooms are built from local earth blocks, with all materials sourced within about 60 miles.
The wastewater system came about because a community member happened to be doing a PhD in that field. Their approach was to use whatever showed up, but never settle for less than the principle: “There were so many opportunities to compromise… But we didn’t want to stop there.”
Growing the reach
Govardhan faced a real choice early on: stay true to an idealistic vision as a small, self-contained community, or open up and share what they were doing with as many people as possible. They chose to open up, and being accessible became part of their mission.
Several things made this work:
- Comfortable, green rooms: City visitors can stay somewhere they feel at ease, while experiencing sustainable building in practice.
- Spirituality as a doorway: A spiritual theme park on site draws people in, and many of them go on to discover the ecology work.
- Yoga partners: Long-standing friends in the yoga community committed bookings before the place was fully built, and became lasting supporters.
- Wellness and Ayurveda: These opened up new audiences who might never have visited an ecovillage otherwise.
- Zero marketing budget: Visitors do the promotion themselves, through word of mouth, videos and social media.
A practical lesson from Mohan: people arrive interested in comfort first, and in your principles second. So Govardhan invested in good Wi-Fi and, above all, fresh, healthy food with real variety and flavour. Guests feel welcome without the community compromising its ideals.
They broke even in 2024, when income from tourism, wellness and yoga training covered Govardhan’s operating costs.
Working with farmers and government
Mohan’s advice on working with farmers: a scientific technique is one thing, but getting a farmer to adopt it is another. “That farmer has a family to feed. They have very little room for experimentation.” So start by listening. Govardhan built a simple one-acre template with crops for short-, medium- and long-term income, and led with guaranteed income rather than the science of regenerative farming. They provide indigenous seeds and bio-inputs, and buy the produce back. Their Seeds for Life project now supports about 2,200 farmer families. “If you are not in ownership of your seeds, you are not in ownership of your own land.”
On working with the government: understand how they think. Governments want to win elections, so show them you are helping the people who matter to them and helping them meet their targets. It takes long-term relationship-building, and ex-bureaucrats on the team help. Their latest campaign, My District – My Plate, promotes local foods like millets and forest vegetables.
One caution from 20 years of social impact work: share your experience, but don’t take ownership of other communities’ decisions. Find the most inspired people and let them lead. Govardhan sees itself as the hub in a hub-and-spoke model, where the spokes belong to the people who live there.
How to run a large community
Mohan’s answer was “both organizational intelligence and spiritual inspiration.”
On the spiritual side: “Any teamwork requires you to put a person or a purpose above yourself. That’s how a community is formed.” People contribute behind the scenes without seeking recognition: “one and one coming together to become eleven.”
On the organizational side, there are dedicated teams for rural development, guest operations, and sustainability and regeneration. The last one makes sure no decision moves the ecovillage away from regeneration, even if it would benefit guest operations. Organization is “a necessary evil” that “really helps you amplify your impact,” so use it for its purpose and stay aware of its downsides.
Everyone in the community has a specific role. There is also a volunteer program for people who can’t leave their careers, and evening mentor groups for spiritual and personal support. “You actually adopt an entire family. You cannot just extract the skills.”
Knowing when to stop growing
“We have all been trained through capitalism and consumerism. As much as you grow, the better. But growth has to be principled growth.”
Govardhan has committed to no new infrastructure inside the ecovillage, to protect its balance with the environment. For those who want to live there, they acquired 70 acres a mile away (GEV 2.0), planned to include homes, a hospital and senior living. Like natural systems, they see themselves at maturity: “When we have the ability, we want to share. We want to take it beyond our boundary.”
Failures and the bamboo stick
Mohan was refreshingly candid about setbacks:
- Two earlier sites failed. One had too little water, and at the other the farmers weren’t willing to join. They moved on.
- Tension with villagers. Workers sometimes left at critical moments over wages. Trust and negotiation usually helped.
- Funding gaps. “There were regular phases when our development work was just abandoned because we didn’t have the next source of funds.”
- People leaving. A mentor advised: let aligned people replace the unaligned ones, “however painful it is.”
He also shared a story about what makes a founder. A person walking through a field picks up a bamboo stick, then a string, then a pumpkin, and eventually they make a musical instrument. “A founder is one who has the ability to see the utility of whatever is available… Please never think we had the instrument from the start.”
The biggest lesson: will before skill
The founding group happened to include engineers and agriculturists, but Mohan’s point was that this wasn’t the key. “When you’re able to convey meaning to people, abilities follow. What is more important is the will. The will to change, the will to serve.” Skills are the easier part. Find people who share the purpose first.
Find out more about Govardhan Ecovillage: https://www.ecovillage.org.in/
