Dr. Meenakshi Prasad

Assistant Professor

P.G. Deptt. Of Geography

Magadh University, Bodh Gaya

For Department of Women Studies

Source : google images

Disclaimer

The material for the presentation has been compiled from various online sources available on the internet. The information contained in the presentation is for general information and education purpose only. Endeavor has been made to keep the information up to date & correct, however the presenter makes no representation of any kind about the completeness & accuracy of the material. The information shared through this presentation should be used for educational purposes only

Contents

• Introduction• Backdrop of the Chipko Movement• Inspiration• Commencement of the Chipko Movement• Progress• Importance• National & Global Influence• Role of Women• Conclusion

Introduction

• The ‘Chipko Movement’ is a forest conservation movement in India which began in 1970’s in rural areas of Uttarakhand, then a part of Uttar Pradesh.

• The movement aimed at protecting trees & forests slated for government-backed logging.

Source : google images

• The hindi word ‘Chipko’ means “to hug” or “to cling to” and reflects the demonstrators primary tactic of embracing the trees to impede the loggers.

• The movement was inspired by the Gandhianprinciple of non-violent satyagraha, wherein the Chipko protesters embraced a tree to prevent its felling.

Source : google images

Backdrop of the Chipko Movement

• With the conclusion of the Sino-Indian border conflict in 1963, the then Indian state of Uttar Pradesh experienced a growth in development, especially in the rural Himalayan regions.

• The interior roads built for the conflict attracted many foreign-based logging companies that sought access to the region’s vast forest resources.

• Although the rural villagers depended heavily on the forest for subsistence - both directly, for food and fuel & indirectly for services such as water purification and

soil stabilization- government policy prevented the villagers from managing the lands and denied them access to the lumber.

• Many of the commercial logging endeavours were mismanaged and the clearcutting of forests led to lower agricultural yields, erosion, depleted water resources & increased flooding throughout much of the surrounding areas.

• In July 1970 devastating Alaknanda river floods took place when a landslide blocked the river and affected an area starting from Hanumanchatti near Badrinath to 320 kilometer downstream till Haridwar. Numerous villages, bridges & roads were washed away.

• As the people were loosing their rights over their local forest resources they were becoming more and more dissatisfied & the increasing hardships due to the environmental disasters increased their ecological awareness regarding forest conservation.

Floods in Alaknanda, 1970

Source : google images

Inspiration of The Chipko Movement

• According to the Centre for Science & Environment, Chipkobegan in 1973 in the remote hill town of Gopeshwar in Uttarakhand.

• However, Chipko type movements date back to 1730 A.D, when in village Prasanna Khamkar of Rajasthan, 363 Bishnoissacrificed their lives to save Khejri trees

Source : google images

Amrita Devi & The Sacrifice of 363 Bishnois :

• The Chipko Movement of the 1970’s draws inspiration from the strugglethat had taken place in Rajasthan over 300 years ago.

• In 1730, Amrita Devi, a Bishnoi woman, heard of the Maharaja of Marwar’s intentions to cut down a sacred grove of Khejri trees to use for the construction of a new palace

• She led the villagers of Khejarli in their refusal to grant access to the trees and continued to argue against the orders of the Maharaja.

• Amrita Devi and 363 Bishnois eventually lost their lives during the protest

• However, shocked by the passive resistance of the Bishnois, the Maharaja recalled his men

• He personally travelled to the village to apologisefor the actions of his men

• The Maharaja instructed that no more Khejritrees be cut down for the construction of his new palace

• While this story was not burned into the popular national consciousness, it was one that the women of the burgeoning Chipko movement were aware of.

Commencement of The ChipkoMovement

• In 1964 environmentalist & Gandhian social activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt founded a cooperative organisation, Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh later named as Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM) with an aim to foster small industries for villagers using the local resources of the forest

• The group established the Dasholi Gram SwarajyaMandal (DGSM) workers' cooperative and entered the market by buying forest rights through auctions to supply its small workshop making farm tools for local use.

• The DGSM also started a new enterprise - the collection of roots and herbs from the forest.

• In this activity, the cooperative gave employment to about 1000 persons between 1969 and 1972.

• In 1971 it opened up a small processing plant in Gopeshwar, which manufactured turpentine and resin from pine sap. Again the DGSM had difficulties, this time because the Forest Department did not allot adequate supplies of pine sap even when the price paid for it was higher than that paid by a partly state-owned producer in the plains. For eight months in 1971-72, the plant had to be closed down for lack of raw material. The plant therefore worked for a total of only four months.

• The Sarvodaya workers thus faced difficulties with government policies in each of their enterprises.

• 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

• During 1971 & 1972 the DGSM workers held demonstrations, rallies & marches to protest against the policies of the Forest Department

• The first Chipko protest occurred near the remote hill town of Gopeshwar in 1973 (March – April) when the Forest Department turned down the Sangh’s annual request of ten ash trees for its farm tools workshop, and instead awarded a contract of 300 trees to Simon Company, a sporting goods manufacturer in distant Allahabad, to make tennis racquets.

• The villagers appealed against it but their appeals were denied

• The villagers , having being denied access to a small number of trees with which to build agricultural tools, were outraged by this decision of the Forest Department

• When the lumbermen arrived to cut the trees they were confronted by the locals.

• Chandi Prasad Bhatt led villagers into the forest and embraced the trees to prevent logging. They also beated drums and shouted slogans, thus forcing the contractors and their lumbermen to retreat.

• After many days of protests, the government cancelled the company’s logging permit and granted the original allotment request by DGSM. Chandi Prasad Bhatt

Source : google images

Progress of The Chipko Movement

• The Chipko movement spread quickly as villagers marched in Pampur Phata, another remote village about 80 kkmaway from Gopeshwar just a few weeks later where the same company was awarded a contract to cut more ash trees. They had to retreat from there as a result of the protests by the local people.

• The final flash point began in 1974, 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 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 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 (Laata

was her ancestral home and Reni adopted

home). Gaura Devi led 27 of the village

women to the site and confronted the

loggers. Gaura Devi

Source : google images

• 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. This went on into late hours. The women kept an all-night vigil guarding their trees from the cutters until a few of them relented and left the village.Gaura Devi & her companions

hugging a tree

Source : google images

• The next day, when the men and leaders returned, the news of the movement spread to the neighbouringLaata and others villages including Henwalghati, and more people joined in. Eventually, after a four-day stand-off, the contractors left.

• 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.

• This became a turning point in the history of eco-development struggles in the region and around the world.

• With these successes, DGSM workers and SunderlalBahuguna, a local environmentalist, began to share Chipko’s tactics with people in other villages throughout the region

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• Over the next five years, the movement spread to many districts in the region, and within a decade throughout the Uttarakhand Himalayas

• In addition to the characteristic “tree hugging,” Chipkoprotesters utilized a number of other techniques grounded in Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (non-violent resistance).

• For example, Bahuguna famously fasted for two weeks in 1974 to protest forest policy

• In 1978, in the Advani forest in the Tehri Garhwaldistrict, 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 IndiraGandhi resulted in a 15-year ban on commercial felling in the Uttarakhand Himalayas. Similar bans were enacted in Himachal Pradesh and the former Uttaranchal

• One of the prominent Chipko leaders, Gandhian SunderlalBahuguna, took a 5,000 kilometre trans-Himalaya foot march in 1981–83, spreading the Chipko message to a far greater area.

Sundarlal Bahuguna

Source : google images

Importance of Chipko Movement

• Under the umbrella of Chipko movement 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

• 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.

• 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.

National & Global Influence of ChipkoMovement

• The Chipko movement has since expanded. Within a few years it began to spread further to Gandhmardan in Orissa, Bastar in Central India, Nahin-Barkot and Thano in the Himalayan foothills, and all over Karnataka and Kerala.

• The movement caught the imaginations of groups concerned with the environment in countries such as Switzerland, France, Mexico, Denmark, Australia, Canada and Malaysia

Role of Women in Chipko Movement

• Women's participation in the Chipko agitation was a very novel aspect of the movement.

• The Garhwali women played a prominent role in the Chipko movement

• When talking about this movement, we not only talk about men such as Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt but also of women such as Gaura Devi, Suraksha Devi, Sudesha Devi, Bachni Devi and others.

• During ecological disasters, rural women are often hit the hardest.

• Many have had to traverse ever greater distances to procure water, fuel and fodder.

• The health effects of this increased workload detrimentally affect rural women.

• In 1975, Chandi Prasad Bhatt remarked, “ecology was much more critical to the Garhwali women than the men”. This was because women faced many of the direct consequences of the mismanagement of the land.

• 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.

• 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

• All this increased their confidence and they started taking up leadership roles in the society

• The Garhwali women showed that women’s liberation was not only about liberation from patriarchal oppression, but also capitalist and economic oppression

Conclusion

• The Chipko Movement went on to become a rallying point for many future environmental movements all over the world.

• It inspired 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 marginalized people.

• 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

• 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."

• In 2004 Chipko protests resumed in response to the lifting of the logging ban in Himachal Pradesh but were unsuccessful in its reenactment.

• This is perhaps due to the fact that a large scale out-migration had taken place from the rural areas of Uttarakhand during the past decades & a large number of villages have become deserted.

• However, the devastating Kedarnath flood in 2013 clearly pointed out that deforestation in the Himalayan region will have strong ecological repercussions.

• Because of the recent COVID -19 pandemic a large number of people have returned back to their native villages in Uttarakhand and they are bound to face the problems brought by deforestation in the region.

• Thus, it may be expected that the Chipko Movement will once again make a comeback in the region