The Chipko movement or Chipko Andolan is a movement that practiced the Gandhian methods
of satyagraha and non-violent resistance, through the act of hugging trees to protect
them from being felled. This was first initiated by Amrita Devi while protesting against a
King's men to cut the tree. The modern Chipko movement started in the early 1970s in the
Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarakhand, then in Uttar Pradesh with growing awareness of rapid
deforestation. The landmark event in this struggle took place on March 26, 1974, when
a group of peasant women in Reni village, Hemwalghati, in Chamoli district, Uttarakhand,
India, acted to prevent the cutting of trees and reclaim their traditional forest rights,
which were threatened by the contractors assigned by the state Forest Department. Their actions
inspired hundreds of such actions at the grassroots level throughout the region. By the 1980s
the movement had spread throughout India and led to the formulation of people-sensitive
forest policies, which put a stop to the open felling of trees in regions as far as the
Vindhyas and the Western Ghats. Today, it is seen as an inspiration and a precursor
for Chipko movement of Garhwal. Its leader was Sunderlal Bahuguna.
History The Chipko movement, though primarily a livelihood
protection movement rather than a forest conservation movement, went on to become a rallying point
for many future environmentalists, environmental protests and movements all over the world
and created a precedent for non-violent protest. It occurred at a time when there was hardly
any environmental movement in the developing world, and its success meant that the world
immediately took notice of this non-violent movement, which was to inspire in time many
such eco-groups by helping to slow down the rapid deforestation, expose vested interests,
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 marginalized people. So much so that, a quarter of a century later, India
Today mentioned the people behind the "forest satyagraha" of the Chipko movement as amongst
"100 people who shaped India". 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
Beginnings In India the forest cover started deteriorating
at an alarming rate, resulting in hardships for those involved in labour-intensive fodder
and firewood collection. This also led to a deterioration in the soil conditions, and
erosion in the area. As water sources dried up in the hills, water shortages became widespread.
Subsequently, communities gave up raising livestock, which added to the problems of
malnutrition in the region. This crisis was heightened by the fact that forest conservation
policies, like the Indian Forest Act, 1927, traditionally restricted the access of local
communities to the forests, resulting in scarce farmlands in an over- populated and extremely
poor area, despite all of its natural wealth. Thus the sharp decline in the local agrarian
economy lead to a migration of people into the plains in search of jobs, leaving behind
several de-populated villages in the 1960s. Gradually a rising awareness of the ecological
crisis, which came from an immediate loss of livelihood caused by it, resulted in the
growth of political activism in the region. The year 1964 saw the establishment of Dasholi
Gram Swarajya Sangh, set up by Gandhian social worker, Chandi Prasad Bhatt in Gopeshwar,
and inspired by Jayaprakash Narayan and the Sarvodaya movement, with an aim to set up
small industries using the resources of the forest. Their first project was a small workshop
making farm tools for local use. Its name was later changed to Dasholi Gram Swarajya
Sangh from the original Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal in the 1980s. Here they had to face
restrictive forest policies, a hangover of colonial era still prevalent, as well as the
"contractor system", in which these pieces of forest land were commodified and auctioned
to big contractors, usually from the plains, who brought along their own skilled and semi-skilled
laborers, leaving only the menial jobs like hauling rocks for the hill people, and paying
them next to nothing. On the other hand, the hill regions saw an influx of more people
from the outside, which only added to the already strained ecological balance.
Hastened by increasing hardships, the Garhwal Himalayas soon became the centre for a rising
ecological awareness of how reckless deforestation had denuded much of the forest cover, resulting
in the devastating Alaknanda River floods of July 1970, when a major landslide blocked
the river and affected an area starting from Hanumanchatti, near Badrinath to 350 km downstream
till Haridwar, further numerous villages, bridges and roads were washed away. Thereafter,
incidences of landslides and land subsidence became common in an area which was experiencing
a rapid increase in civil engineering projects. Organization
Soon villagers, especially women, started organizing themselves under several smaller
groups, taking up local causes with the authorities, and standing up against commercial logging
operations that threatened their livelihoods. In October 1971, the Sangh workers held a
demonstration in Gopeshwar to protest against the policies of the Forest Department. More
rallies and marches were held in late 1972, but to little effect, until a decision to
take direct action was taken. The first such occasion occurred when the Forest Department
turned down the Sangh’s annual request for ten ash trees for its farm tools workshop,
and instead awarded a contract for 300 trees to Simon Company, a sporting goods manufacturer
in distant Allahabad, to make tennis rackets. In March, 1973, the lumbermen arrived at Gopeshwar,
and after a couple of weeks, they were confronted at village Mandal on April 24, 1973, where
about hundred villagers and DGSS workers were beating drums and shouting slogans, thus forcing
the contractors and their lumbermen to retreat. This was the first confrontation of the movement,
The contract was eventually cancelled and awarded to the Sangh instead. By now, the
issue had grown beyond the mere procurement of an annual quota of three ash trees, and
encompassed a growing concern over commercial logging and the government's forest policy,
which the villagers saw as unfavourable towards them. The Sangh also decided to resort to
tree-hugging, or Chipko, as a means of non-violent protest.
But the struggle was far from over, as the same company was awarded more ash trees, in
the Phata forest, 80 km away from Gopeshwar. Here again, due to local opposition, starting
on June 20, 1973, the contractors retreated after a stand-off that lasted a few days.
Thereafter, the villagers of Phata and Tarsali formed a vigil group and watched over the
trees till December, when they had another successful stand-off, when the activists reached
the site in time. The lumberermen retreated leaving behind the five ash trees felled.
The final flash point began a few months later, when the government announced an auction scheduled
in January, 1974, for 2,500 trees near Reni village, overlooking the Alaknanda River.
Bhatt set out for the villages in the Reni area, and incited the villagers, who decided
to protest against the actions of the government by hugging the trees. Over the next few weeks,
rallies and meetings continued in the Reni area.
On March 25, 1974, the day the lumbermen were to cut the trees, the men of the Reni village
and DGSS workers were in Chamoli, diverted by state government and contractors to a fictional
compensation payment site, while back home labourers arrived by the truckload to start
logging operations. A local girl, on seeing them, rushed to inform Gaura Devi, the head
of the village Mahila Mangal Dal, at Reni village. Gaura Devi led 27 of the village
women to the site and confronted the loggers. When all talking failed, and instead the loggers
started to shout and abuse the women, threatening them with guns, the women resorted to hugging
the trees to stop them from being felled. This went on into late hours. The women kept
an all-night vigil guarding their trees from the cutters till a few of them relented and
left the village. The next day, when the men and leaders returned, the news of the movement
spread to the neighbouring Laata and others villages including Henwalghati, and more people
joined in. Eventually only after a four-day stand-off, the contractors left.
Aftermath The news soon reached the state capital, where
then state Chief Minister, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, set up a committee to look into
the matter, which eventually ruled in favour of the villagers. This became a turning point
in the history of eco-development struggles in the region and around the world.
The struggle soon spread across many parts of the region, and such spontaneous stand-offs
between the local community and timber merchants occurred at several locations, with hill women
demonstrating their new-found power as non-violent activists. As the movement gathered shape
under its leaders, the name Chipko Movement was attached to their activities. According
to Chipko historians, the term originally used by Bhatt was the word "angalwaltha" in
the Garhwali language for "embrace", which later was adapted to the Hindi word, Chipko,
which means to stick. Subsequently, over the next five years the
movement spread to many districts in the region, and within a decade throughout the Uttarakhand
Himalayas. Larger issues of ecological and economic exploitation of the region were raised.
The villagers demanded that no forest-exploiting contracts should be given to outsiders and
local communities should have effective control over natural resources like land, water, and
forests. They wanted the government to provide low-cost materials to small industries and
ensure development of the region without disturbing the ecological balance. The movement took
up economic issues of landless forest workers and asked for guarantees of minimum wage.
Globally Chipko demonstrated how environment causes, up until then considered an activity
of the rich, were a matter of life and death for the poor, who were all too often the first
ones to be devastated by an environmental tragedy. Several scholarly studies were made
in the aftermath of the movement. In 1977, in another area, women tied sacred threads,
Raksha Bandhan, around trees earmarked for felling in a Hindu tradition which signifies
a bond between brother and sisters. Women’s participation in the Chipko agitation
was a very novel aspect of the movement. The forest contractors of the region usually doubled
up as suppliers of alcohol to men. Women held sustained agitations against the habit of
alcoholism and broadened the agenda of the movement to cover other social issues. The
movement achieved a victory when the government issued a ban on felling of trees in the Himalayan
regions for fifteen years in 1980 by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, until the green
cover was fully restored. One of the prominent Chipko leaders, Gandhian Sunderlal Bahuguna,
took a 5,000-kilometre trans-Himalaya foot march in 1981–83, spreading the Chipko message
to a far greater area. Gradually, women set up cooperatives to guard local forests, and
also organized fodder production at rates conducive to local environment. Next, they
joined in land rotation schemes for fodder collection, helped replant degraded land,
and established and ran nurseries stocked with species they selected.
Participants
One of Chipko's most salient features was the mass participation of female villagers.
As the backbone of Uttarakhand's Agrarian economy, women were most directly affected
by environmental degradation and deforestation, and thus related to the issues most easily.
How much this participation impacted or derived from the ideology of Chipko has been fiercely
debated in academic circles. Despite this, both female and male activists
did play pivotal roles in the movement including Gaura Devi, Sudesha Devi, Bachni Devi, Chandi
Prasad Bhatt, Sundarlal Bahuguna, Govind Singh Rawat, Dhoom Singh Negi, Shamsher Singh Bisht
and Ghanasyam Raturi, the Chipko poet, whose songs echo throughout the Himalayas. Out of
which, Chandi Prasad Bhatt was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982, and Sundarlal
Bahuguna was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2009.
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 afforestation, 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 2000.
In recent years, the movement not only inspired numerous people to work on practical programmes
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 March 26, 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 March 26, 1974. This marked the beginning of worldwide methods to improve the present
situation. Bibliography
Anupam Mishra, Satyendra Tripathi: Chipko movement: Uttarakhand women's bid to save
forest wealth. Pub. by People's Action, 1978. J. Bandopadhyay and Vandana Shiva: Chipko:
India's Civilisational Response to the Forest Crisis. Indian National Trust for Art and
Cultural Heritage. Pub. by INTACH, 1986. J. Bandopadhyay and Vandana Shiva: "The Chipko
Movement Against Limestone Quarrying In Doon Valley" in: Lokayan Bulletin, 5 : 3, 1987,
pp. 19–25 online Thomas Weber, Hugging the trees: the story
of the Chipko movement, Viking, 1988. Somen Chakraborty: A Critique of Social Movements
in India: Experiences of Chipko, Uttarakhand, and Fishworkers' Movement, Published by Indian
Social Institute, 1999. ISBN 81-87218-06-1. Guha, Ramachandra: The Unquiet woods : ecological
change and peasant resistance in the Himalaya, Berkeley, Calif. [etc.] : University of California
Press, Expanded edition 2000. Rangan, Haripriya : Of Myths and movements :
rewriting Chipko into Himalayan history, London [etc.]: Verso, 2000. ISBN 1-85984-305-0. Excerpts
References
Chapter 4 - Hugs the Tree Gandhi today: a report on Mahatma Gandhi's successors, by
Mark Shepard. Published by Shepard Publications, 1987. ISBN 0-938497-04-9.
Chapter 4 - The Chipko movement Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts Over Natural
Resources in India, by Vandana Shiva. United Nations University Press. Sage Publications.
1991. ISBN 0-8039-9672-1. External links
Standing up for trees: Women's role in the Chipko Movement at FAO
Resources on Chipko movement Chipko Heritage
The Chipko movement and women