The Chipko Movement and the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM)

The Chipko Movement is probably the best known of India's grassroots forest conservation movements, and it emerged in the early 1970s in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas, in what was then part of Uttar Pradesh and is today the state of Uttarakhand. Its name comes directly from the tactic that defined it: the Hindi word 'chipkna' means to stick, cling or embrace, and Chipko activists -- prominently including women from local villages -- physically embraced trees marked for felling, placing themselves between the trees and the axes of loggers working for commercial timber contractors, so that the trees could not be cut without harming the protesters first.

A crucial organisational root of the movement lay in the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM), a local cooperative organisation based in the Gopeshwar area of Chamoli district and closely associated with the social and environmental activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. From the 1960s onward, DGSM worked to secure sustainable livelihoods for local villagers through the community-based, cooperative use of forest produce -- for example, producing small manufactured goods from timber allotted to the cooperative, rather than seeing that timber go to outside commercial contractors. Tension grew when local communities and cooperatives such as DGSM found themselves repeatedly denied access to trees that were instead allotted to large commercial contractors working for industries based far from the forest itself; this perceived unfairness, layered on top of already mounting concern about deforestation's effects on soil erosion, landslides and flooding in the fragile Himalayan terrain, became the immediate trigger for direct, organised, non-violent resistance. When contractors arrived to fell allotted trees, DGSM-linked villagers moved to prevent it by embracing the trees themselves -- and this specific confrontation, in the early 1970s, is generally regarded as the founding action from which the wider Chipko Movement grew and then spread rapidly to other villages across the Garhwal Himalayas.

Women played an especially prominent and often leading role in the movement, since it was frequently women -- who did much of the daily work of collecting fuelwood, fodder and water from the surrounding forest, and who were therefore most directly affected by its degradation -- who confronted loggers directly. In one of the most widely told episodes of the movement, associated with the village of Reni, women led by Gaura Devi confronted a party of loggers who had arrived to fell trees while many of the village's men were away, successfully persuading and physically preventing the loggers from proceeding with the felling. Alongside these direct, local actions, figures such as Sunderlal Bahuguna helped carry the movement's message to a wider audience, undertaking long padayatras (foot marches) through the Himalayan region to build public awareness and support, and helping connect local forest-protection actions to broader questions about ecological balance, soil conservation and the true long-term value of standing forests versus the short-term commercial value of felled timber. …