Q.Read the passage given below carefully and answer the following questions : The movement began in two or three villages of Uttarakhand when the forest department refused permission to the villagers to fell ash trees for making agricultural tools. However, the forest department allotted the same patch of land to a sports manufacturer for commercial use. This enraged the villagers and they protested against the move of the government. The struggle soon spread across many parts of the Uttarakhand region. Larger issues of ecological and economic exploitation of the region were raised.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The passage describes the Chipko Movement, a pioneering environmental protest in Uttarakhand where villagers hugged trees to prevent commercial logging, linking forest rights to broader ecological and economic survival.
The scene is set in the early 1970s, in the hill villages of what was then Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand). For generations, the local villagers had depended on the forests for fuel, fodder, and timber for agricultural tools. When the forest department refused them permission to fell ash trees for making ploughs and other implements, but then promptly allotted the same patch of land to a sports manufacturer for commercial use, the injustice was stark and immediate. The villagers did not just see a bureaucratic denial — they saw a government that valued a distant company’s profit over their own survival. This sparked a protest that would become legendary.
The movement that erupted from this anger is the Chipko Movement. The name comes from the Hindi word chipko, meaning "to hug" or "to cling". Its novel aspect was the method of protest: villagers, especially women, would physically embrace the trees to prevent them from being felled. This non-violent, direct action turned the trees into living symbols of community resistance. It was not a petition or a strike — it was a human chain of bodies standing between the axes and the trunks. This tactic was both deeply emotional and strategically brilliant, because it forced the loggers to either back down or physically harm the protesters.
The Chipko Movement is often traced to a specific incident in 1973 in Mandal village, led by local activists like Chandi Prasad Bhatt and later joined by Gaura Devi and others. The women’s participation was especially striking, as they were the ones most directly affected by the loss of forest resources for daily needs.
The issues of ecological and economic exploitation raised by the movement went far beyond the single incident of the ash trees. Ecologically, the protesters pointed out that deforestation in the Himalayas led to soil erosion, landslides, and the drying up of springs and streams — disasters that directly threatened their villages and farms. Economically, they argued that the forests were being plundered for the benefit of outside industries (sports goods, timber, resin) while the local people, who had conserved these forests for centuries, were denied even basic access. The movement thus framed the forest not as a resource to be extracted, but as a common heritage that sustained life itself.
| Aspect | What the movement challenged |
|--------|------------------------------|
| Ecological | Deforestation causing landslides, loss of water sources, and climate instability in the Himalayan region |
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