Gaura Devi

Gaura Devi led the moment that made the Chipko movement world-famous: on 26 March 1974, she and about two dozen women of Reni village stood between a logging crew and their forest, and did not move until the axes went back down the mountain.

She was born in 1925 in Lata, a Bhotiya village of the Niti valley in Chamoli, and married into nearby Reni. Widowed young, she raised her son alone, worked the fields and herds like every hill woman, and in time headed the village Mahila Mangal Dal, the women's committee.

In March 1974 the forest above Reni, over two thousand trees, was marked for felling. On the day the labourers came, the men of Reni had been drawn away to Chamoli on the pretext of compensation payments. A girl spotted the crew, and Gaura Devi gathered the women and walked up to the forest. They argued, were abused and threatened, and still stood their ground; her words to the loggers are remembered in the hills as 'this forest is our mother's home'. The crew retreated, the felling was cancelled, and the action, taken entirely by women, changed both Indian forestry and how the world saw village women.

She died in 1991, having never sought office or reward. Reni's stand fed directly into the 1980 ban on green felling in the high Himalaya, and Gaura Devi is remembered as the mother of the Chipko movement.