CHIPKO MOVEMENT
INTRODUCTION
The Chipko movement or Chipko Andolan, was a forest conservation movement
in India. It began in 1970s in Uttarakhand, and then a part of Uttar Pradesh (at the
foothills of Himalayas) went on to become a rallying point for many future
environmental movements all over the world. It created a precedent for starting
nonviolent protest in India, and its success meant that the world immediately
took notice of this non-violent movement, which was to inspire in time many
similar eco-groups by helping to slow down the rapid deforestation, expose
vested interests, increase social awareness and the need to save trees, increase
ecological awareness, and demonstrate the viability of people power. Above all, it
stirred up the existing civil society in India, which began to address the issues of
tribal and marginalised people. The Chipko Andolan or the Chipko movement is a
movement that practiced methods of Satyagraha where both male and female
activists from Uttarakhand played vital roles, including Gaura Devi, Suraksha Devi,
Sudesha Devi, Bachni Devi and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Virushka Devi and others.
Today, beyond the eco-socialism hue, it is being seen increasingly as an
ecofeminism movement. Although many of its leaders were men, women were
not only its backbone, but also its mainstay, because they were the ones most
affected by the rampant deforestation, which led to a lack of firewood and fodder
as well as water for drinking and irrigation. Over the years they also became
primary stakeholders in a majority of the afforestation work that happened under
the Chipko movement. In 1987, the Chipko movement was awarded the Right
Livelihood Award "for its dedication to the conservation, restoration and
ecologically-sound use of India's natural resources."
A similar type of movement was observed way back in 1730s when in Prasanna
Khamkar, a village in Rajasthan, 363 Bishnois(Hindu religious sect of Western Thar
Desert) sacrificed their lives for Khejri trees.
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THE MOVEMENT
In 1964 environmentalist and Gandhian social activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt
founded a cooperative organization, Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (later renamed
Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal [DGSM]), to foster small industries for rural
villagers, using local resources. When industrial logging was linked to the severe
monsoon floods that killed more than 200 people in the region in 1970, DGSM
became a force of opposition against the large-scale industry. The first Chipko
protest occurred near the village of Mandal in the upper Alaknanda valley in April
1973. The villagers, having been denied access to a small number of trees with
which to build agricultural tools, were outraged when the government allotted a
much larger plot to a sporting goods manufacturer. When their appeals were
denied, Chandi Prasad Bhatt led villagers into the forest and embraced the trees
to prevent logging. After many days of those protests, the government canceled
the company’s logging permit and granted the original allotment requested by
DGSM.
With the success in Mandal, DGSM workers and Sunderlal Bahuguna, a local
environmentalist, began to share Chipko’s tactics with people in other villages
throughout the region. One of the next major protests occurred in 1974 near the
village of Reni, where more than 2,000 trees were scheduled to be felled. When
timber contractors came to Reni village in March 1974, it is said that a large
number of women led by Gaura Devi, a leader of the village women’s
organisation, kept an all-night vigil for four days at the logging area to prevent
deforestation, enduring the cold weather as well as the contractor’s threats. In
addition, Sunderlal Bahuguna and others were active in demonstrations against
forest auctions. In October 1974, for instance, he entered the auction hall at
Uttarkashi and made a plea for the halting of proceedings. He also played a
leading role in conducting the “Askot-Arakot Foot March (pad yÁtra)” in October-
November 1974. In this foot march, participants walked from Askot, a village in
east Uttarakhand, approximately 700km to Arakot, a village in west Uttarakhand,
in order to disseminate the messages of the Chipko movement to the whole of
the Uttarakhand. The action in Reni prompted the state government to establish
a committee to investigate deforestation in the Alaknanda valley and ultimately
led to a 10-year ban on commercial logging in the area.
The Chipko movement thus began to emerge as a peasant and women’s
movement for forest rights, though the various protests were largely
decentralized and autonomous. In addition to the characteristic “tree hugging,”
Chipko protesters utilized a number of other techniques grounded in Mahatma
Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (nonviolent resistance). For example, Bahuguna
famously fasted for two weeks in 1974 to protest forest policy. In 1978, in the
Advani forest in the Tehri Garhwal district, Chipko activist Dhoom Singh Negi
fasted to protest the auctioning of the forest, while local women tied sacred
threads around the trees and read from the Bhagavadgita. In other areas, chir
pines (Pinus roxburghii) that had been tapped for resin were bandaged to protest
their exploitation. In Pulna village in the Bhyundar valley in 1978, the women
confiscated the loggers’ tools and left receipts for them to be claimed if they
withdrew from the forest. It is estimated that between 1972 and 1979, more than
150 villages were involved with the Chipko movement, resulting in 12 major
protests and many minor confrontations in Uttarakhand. The movement’s major
success came in 1980, when an appeal from Bahuguna to Indian Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi resulted in a 15-year ban on commercial felling in the Uttarakhand
Himalayas. Similar bans were enacted in Himachal Pradesh and the former
Uttaranchal.
LASTING IMPACTS
As the movement continued, protests became more project-oriented and
expanded to include the entire ecology of the region, ultimately becoming the
“Save Himalaya” movement. Between 1981 and 1983, Bahuguna marched 5,000
km (3,100 miles) across the Himalayas to bring the movement to prominence.
Throughout the 1980s many protests were focused on the Tehri dam on the
Bhagirathi River and various mining operations, resulting in the closure of at least
one limestone quarry. Similarly, a massive reforestation effort led to the planting
of more than one million trees in the region. In 2004 Chipko protests resumed in
response to the lifting of the logging ban in Himachal Pradesh but were
unsuccessful in its reenactment.
NOTABLE PARTICIPANTS
1. CHANDI PRASAD BHATT: Chandi Prasad Bhatt (born 1934) is an Indian
Gandhian environmentalist and social activist, who founded Dasholi Gram
Swarajya Sangh (DGSS) in Gopeshwar in 1964, which later became a
mother-organization to the Chipko Movement, in which he was one of the
pioneers, and for which he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for
Community Leadership in 1982, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Today he is known for his work on subaltern social ecology, and considered
one of India's first modern environmentalist.[3] In 2013, he was the
recipient of the Gandhi Peace Prize
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2. SUNDERLAL BAHUGUNA: Sunderlal Bahuguna is an eco-activist (an eco-
activist is a person who works to address ecological problems then
challenges the system that created the problem and works to bring healthy
ecological balance back) from India. Sunderlal has spent his life working to
educate Indian villagers, protesting against ecological destruction by the
government and protecting the Himalayan Mountains. Mr. Bahuguna has
had an active role within the Chipko and anti-Tehri Dam movements.
Sunderlal has struggled for change in all of the above areas using peaceful
resistance. He learned from Mohandas Gandhi to use peaceful means to
bring major changes for his community. As a Ghandian peace worker he
does not resort to violence to achieve the change he is working toward.
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3. GAURA DEVI: The inspiring lady, Gaura Devi is famous as Chipko woman.
She was born in 1925 in a mediocre family by Narayana Singh of village
Lata. At the age of 11, she was married to Meharban Singh. She faced a lot
of problems after passing away of her husband when she was 22. She
raised her son, Chandra Singh and made him a trader in Indo-China trade of
that time. When the trade went shut down in 1962 due to Indo-China war,
Chandra Singh earned their livelihood through contractor ship, wool trading
and farming. Seeing her child settled, Gaura Devi started helping villagers.
Meanwhile in 1972 furious flood hit Alaknanda river due to while people
got aware of its precautions. Environmentalist, Chandi Prasad Bhatt stood
first to help to control and protect the loss of life and property. After the
Indo-China war, Chamoli gained a sight in Indian government and trees
were commenced to cut down to make an easier path for soldiers. The
affected people realized the importance of steady mountains and opposed
to cut them. In 1962, Gaura Devi was elected as the chairman of the same
in Reni village.
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4. DHOOM SINGH NEGI: 79 year old Shri Dhoom Singh Negi, he hails from
Pipaleth village in the Tehri Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. A passionate
social worker, he is one of the pillars of the people’s environmental
movements in Uttarakhand and the Himalayan region.
A true Gandhian warrior, Negi is a confluence of an activist, sensitive writer,
agriculturist, soldier, scientist and a sociologist who works with unwavering
commitment. He contributed greatly to the Chipko Movement and later
movements related to environment protection.
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LEGACY
In Tehri District, Chipko activists would go on to protest limestone mining in the
Doon Valley in the 1980s, as the movement spread through the Dehradun district,
which had earlier seen deforestation of its forest cover leading to heavy loss of
flora and fauna. Finally quarrying was banned after years of agitation by Chipko
activists, followed by a vast public drive for aforestation, which turned around the
valley, just in time. Also in the 1980s, activists like Bahuguna protested against
construction of the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi River, which went on for the next
two decades, before founding the Beej Bachao Andolan, the Save the Seeds
movement, that continues to the present day.
Over time, as a United Nations Environment Programme report mentioned,
Chipko activists started "working a socio-economic revolution by winning control
of their forest resources from the hands of a distant bureaucracy which is only
concerned with the selling of forestland for making urban-oriented products". The
Chipko movement became a benchmark for socio-ecological movements in other
forest areas of Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar; in September 1983,
Chipko inspired a similar, Appiko movement in Karnataka state of India, where
tree felling in the Western Ghats and Vindhyas was stopped. In Kumaon region,
Chipko took on a more radical tone, combining with the general movement for a
separate Uttarakhand state, which was eventually achieved in 2001.
In recent years, the movement not only inspired numerous people to work on
practical programs of water management, energy conservation, afforestation, and
recycling, but also encouraged scholars to start studying issues of environmental
degradation and methods of conservation in the Himalayas and throughout India.
On 26 March 2004, Reni, Laata, and other villages of the Niti Valley celebrated the
30th anniversary of the Chipko movement, where all the surviving original
participants united. The celebrations started at Laata, the ancestral home of
Gaura Devi, where Pushpa Devi, wife of late Chipko Leader Govind Singh Rawat,
Dhoom Singh Negi, Chipko leader of Henwalghati, Tehri Garhwal, and others were
celebrated. From here a procession went to Reni, the neighbouring village, where
the actual Chipko action took place on 26 March 1974. This marked the beginning
of worldwide methods to improve the present situation. Recently, by following
the legacy of the Chipko movement, in 2017 rapid deforestation over the century-
old trees, forming almost a canopy in Jessore Road of the district of North 24
Parganas, West Bengal, has also flicked off a huge movement in the form of the
campaign of saving 4000 trees by the local masses.
On 26 March 2018, a Chipko movement conservation initiative was marked by
Google Doodle on its 45th anniversary.
REFERENCES
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Re-evaluating the Chipko(forest protection) movement in India, research paper by
Shinya Ishizaka
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