People's Movements for Environmental Conservation: An Overview

Alongside the technical systems used to manage solid and radioactive waste, India has a long and distinctive history of a different kind of environmental protection: grassroots, people-led movements in which local communities -- acting without waiting for, and sometimes in direct opposition to, official government decisions -- organised themselves to prevent the destruction of forests and wilderness they depended upon or valued. The WBCHSE syllabus specifically names four such episodes for study, spanning an unusually long period of Indian history, from the early eighteenth century through to the closing decades of the twentieth century.

The earliest of the four, the Amrita Devi Bishnoi movement, took place in Rajasthan and is traditionally dated to around 1730, when members of the Bishnoi community at the village of Khejarli resisted the felling of sacred Khejri trees, with the woman Amrita Devi and a number of others giving their lives in the act of physically protecting the trees. The most recent of the organisational threads, the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM), was a cooperative body active in the Garhwal Himalayas from the 1960s onward that mobilised local villagers around the sustainable, community-based use of forest produce -- and it was this same organisational base, associated particularly with the activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt, that gave rise directly to the Chipko Movement in the early 1970s, in which villagers (again, prominently, women) used the tactic of embracing trees to stop them being felled by contractors. Around the same period, in the very different geography of Kerala's Western Ghats, the Silent Valley movement brought together scientists, activists and concerned citizens to oppose a hydroelectric dam project that would have submerged part of an exceptionally biodiverse, largely untouched tropical rainforest. …