Write short note on significance of the Chipko Movement. (2019, 10 Marks)
Chipko (“to hug”) began at Mandal, Chamoli, in April 1973, when Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh threatened to embrace ash trees the Forest Department had handed to a sports-goods firm. On 26 March 1974 Gaura Devi, head of Reni’s Mahila Mangal Dal, led the village women to guard a forest marked for felling. Its significance lies less in trees saved than in the questions it raised about development.
Significance
- Ecology as livelihood. Ramachandra Guha, in The Unquiet Woods (1989), reads Chipko as peasant resistance continuous with colonial-era forest protests: villagers wanted fuel, fodder and small timber, not wilderness — the founding case of the environmentalism of the poor.
- Dissent from a single model of development. Chipko questioned growth that turned the commons of ecosystem people into inputs for distant omnivores (Madhav Gadgil and Guha’s terms).
- Policy change. In 1980 the Centre banned commercial green felling above 1,000 metres in the Uttar Pradesh Himalaya, announced for fifteen years. The Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 made central approval mandatory for diverting forest land, and the National Forest Policy 1988 declared local needs the first charge on forest produce.
- Women on the front line. Deforestation lengthened women’s daily walk for fuel, fodder and water. Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) made Chipko the emblem of ecofeminism; others see a material interest born of the gendered division of labour. Women seldom became leaders, yet their Reni stand unsettled village gender hierarchies.
- A repertoire. Gandhian non-violence and padayatra, extended by Sunderlal Bahuguna’s 5,000-kilometre trans-Himalayan march (1981–83) into a “Save Himalaya” campaign, carried the method to Appiko in Karnataka (1983); the movement received the Right Livelihood Award in 1987.
Limits
- Divided goals. Bhatt sought forest-based village industry; Bahuguna preached conservation. They agreed only on the contractor.
- A prohibition, not a right. The ban took the forest from contractors but did not give it to villagers. By the late 1980s hill villages complained that forest law blocked roads and local works; Haripriya Rangan (Of Myths and Movements, 2000) argues Chipko hardened into a myth of timeless peasants guarding pristine nature.
- Present relevance. The 2021 Rishiganga flood, which wrecked a hydel project at Reni itself, and Joshimath’s 2023 subsidence bore out Chipko’s warning.
Conclusion
Chipko’s significance is conceptual more than material: it made whose forest, and whose development? a political question. Its core demand, community control, reached the statute book only with the Forest Rights Act 2006, and remains contested after the 2023 amendment of the forest law.