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.
Following a large student-led demonstration, the government
summoned the men of the surrounding villages to a nearby city
for compensation, ostensibly to allow the loggers to proceed
without confrontation. However, they were met with the women
of the village, led by Gaura Devi, who refused to move out of the
forest and eventually forced the loggers to withdraw. 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.
Chipko movement
Villagers including women began to organise themselves under several smaller
groups. It was started in 1973, taking up local causes with the authorities, and stand
up against commercial logging operations that threatened their livelihoods. In
October 1971, the Sangha 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 shaurya 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 racquets. In March 1973, the lumbermen arrived
at Gopeshwar, and after a couple of weeks, they were confronted at village Mandal
on 24 April 1973, where about a 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 the 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 (50 miles) away from Gopeshwar. Here again, due to local opposition, starting
on 20 June 1974, 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 until December, when they had another successful stand-off when the
activists reached the site in time. The lumbermen retreated leaving behind the five
ash trees that felled.
A few months later, the final flashpoint began 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.
[11]
On 25 March 1974, the day the lumbermen were to cut the trees, the men of Reni
village and DGSS workers were in Chamoli, diverted by the state government and
contractors to a fictional compensation payment site, while back home labourers
arrived by the truckload to start logging operations.[12] A local girl rushed to inform
Gaura Devi, the head of the village Mahila Mangal Dal, at Reni village (Laata was
her ancestral home and Reni adopted home). Gaura Devi led 27 of the village
women to the site and confronted the loggers. When all talking failed, and 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. The women
kept an all-night vigil guarding their trees against the cutters until 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 other villages including
Henwalghati, and more people joined in. Eventually, after a four-day stand-off, the
contractors left.[11][13]
Effect
[edit]
The news soon reached the state capital, where the 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.
[14]
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.[12] In 1977, in
another area, women tied sacred threads, called Rakhi, around trees destined for
felling. According to the Hindu tradition of Raksha Bandhan, the Rakhi signifies a
bond between brother and sisters. They declared that the trees would be saved even
if it cost them their lives.[15]
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.[16] One of the prominent Chipko leaders,
Gandhian Sunderlal Bahuguna, took a 5,000 kilometre (3000 mile) trans-Himalaya
foot march in 1981–83, spreading the Chipko message to a far greater area.
[17]
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.[18]
