CHIPKO MOVEMENT - THE GREEN SAVIOURS

The simple, collective act of hugging trees saved the remaining forests in the Himalayas and serves as a beacon to both policy-making and environmental activism in India and beyond

- BY JUMANA SHAH

Can the dead weight of a bureaucratic decision be worn down by the homespun tactics of villagers led by women? The Chipko And-olan, one of the most significant environmental movements in India, showed that it can. It crystallised in the villages of Chamoli tehsil of Uttarakhand's Garhwal region (then in Uttar Pradesh) in the early 1970s, and was mounted against rapid deforestation that took an axe to livelihoods through its deleterious side-effects—flooding, landslides and depletion of water sources. The immediate spark: the (then) UP government's auctioning of 2,500 trees in the region for commercial felling. When the loggers approached Reni village in March 1974, Gaura Devi and other women embraced the trees earmarked for felling and told the loggers their axes will have to pass through them first. Earlier, in 1973, women in n