Q.What is the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM), and in which area of Uttarakhand was it based?

The Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM) was a local cooperative organisation based in the Gopeshwar area of the Garhwal Himalayas (Chamoli district, present-day Uttarakhand), active from the 1960s and closely associated with the activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. It worked to secure sustainable livelihoods for local villagers through the community-based, cooperative use of forest produce, rather than seeing that produce allotted instead to large outside commercial timber contractors. When such allotment disputes repeatedly favoured commercial contractors over the local cooperative, DGSM-linked villagers responded in the early 1970s by directly, non-violently preventing the felling of the disputed trees -- an action that is generally regarded as the founding event from which the wider Chipko Movement grew and then spread across the region. DGSM illustrates how a sustained local cooperative, built around everyday livelihood concerns rather than environmental activism as such, can provide exactly the organisational base a larger conservation movement needs to take hold and spread.