1. Dr. Meenakshi Prasad
Assistant Professor
P.G. Deptt. Of Geography
Magadh University, Bodh Gaya
For Department of Women Studies
Source : google images
2. 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
3. Contents
• Introduction
• Backdrop of the Chipko Movement
• Inspiration
• Commencement of the Chipko Movement
• Progress
• Importance
• National & Global Influence
• Role of Women
• Conclusion
4. 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
5. • 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 Gandhian
principle of non-violent
satyagraha, wherein the
Chipko protesters
embraced a tree to
prevent its felling.
Source : google images
6. 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
7. 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.
8. • 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
9. Inspiration of The Chipko Movement
• According to the Centre
for Science &
Environment, Chipko
began 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 Bishnois
sacrificed their lives to
save Khejri trees
Source : google images
10. 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.
11. • 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 apologise
for the actions of his men
• The Maharaja instructed that no more Khejri
trees 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.
12. Commencement of The Chipko
Movement
• 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 Swarajya
Mandal (DGSM) workers' cooperative and entered the
market by buying forest rights through auctions to
supply its small workshop making farm tools for local
use.
13. • 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.
14. • 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
15. • 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
16. • 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
17. Progress of The Chipko Movement
• The Chipko movement spread quickly as villagers marched
in Pampur Phata, another remote village about 80 kkm
away 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.
18. • 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
19. • 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
20. • 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, 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.
21. • With these successes, DGSM workers and Sunderlal
Bahuguna, 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.
22. • 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,” Chipko
protesters utilized a number of other techniques grounded
in Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (non-violent
resistance).
23. • For example, Bahuguna famously fasted for two
weeks in 1974 to protest forest policy
• In 1978, in the Advani forest in the Tehri Garhwal
district, 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.
24. • 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 Indira
Gandhi resulted in a 15-year ban on commercial felling
in the Uttarakhand Himalayas. Similar bans were
enacted in Himachal Pradesh and the former
Uttaranchal
25. • 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.
Sundarlal Bahuguna
Source : google images
26. 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.
27. • 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.
28. • 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.
29. National & Global Influence of Chipko
Movement
• 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
30. 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.
31. • 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.
32. • 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
33. 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.
34. • 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."
35. • 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.
36. • 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
