Pitchandikulam Forest is an environmental organisation and community based in the green belt of Auroville in coastal Tamil Nadu, South India, where you can find:
-a seventy-acre forest
-our social outreach and external consultancy offices
-a wildlife research unit
-a bio-resource education centre
-classrooms and meeting rooms (both indoors and outdoors)
-an art studio
-a seedling nursery and display seed room
-a medicinal plant garden
-a museum of rural Tamil life
-an architecture and structural design practice
-volunteer accommodation and communal kitchen
-private housing for the Pitchandikulam community
Our mature forest, and much of our restoration and reforestation work, celebrates the indigenous vegetation of our bioregion – the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest (TDEF) – which is one of the rarest and most diverse wild ecosystems in India. It is a peaceful sanctuary with over 800 species of plants in the grasslands, nursery and in our ethnomedicinal forest.
The name Pitchandikulam means “Pitchandi’s Pond” in Tamil, named after a local traditional healer (vaidya) called Pitchandi who practised healing at the pond (kulam) in the heart of our forest many centuries ago.