The Chipko Movement

Chipko, meaning 'to cling', began in the villages of Chamoli in 1973 as a peasant defence of forest rights: when loggers came, the villagers embraced the trees so they could not be felled. It grew into one of the world's most famous environmental movements.

The trigger was forest policy. Hill villagers were denied ash trees for farm tools while the same trees were allotted to a sports-goods company from the plains. In April 1973, at Mandal village near Gopeshwar, villagers led by Chandi Prasad Bhatt and the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh declared they would hug the trees rather than let them fall, and the contractors withdrew.

The moment that made Chipko history came at Reni, above the Alaknanda, on 26 March 1974. With the men drawn away to Chamoli, a work gang moved on the forest, and Gaura Devi led about two dozen women of the village up the slope. They stood between the axes and the trees through the day and forced the crew back, an action taken entirely by village women defending their own watershed. The felling was cancelled and the Reni forest saved.

From Chamoli the idea walked across the hills. Sunderlal Bahuguna carried it valley to valley and framed its ecology ('what do the forests bear? soil, water and pure air'), and in 1980 the Indira Gandhi government imposed a fifteen-year ban on green felling above a thousand metres in the Uttar Pradesh Himalaya. Chipko received the Right Livelihood Award in 1987, and its example seeded forest movements far beyond India. It also taught the hills that organised, peaceful pressure works, a lesson the statehood movement would use two decades later.