How Chipko resonated beyond the Himalayas

The Chipko Andolan lost its ground at home, but its legacy lies in people’s ecological movements that emerged elsewhere in the country

Given my interest in people’s ecological movements, I was greatly fascinated by the Chipko Andolan in Garhwal. Chandi Prasad Bhatt was a key actor in this movement, and I quickly contacted him. He and his colleagues in the Sarvodaya movement began organising a series of eco-development camps in the Alakananda valley as a follow-up to Chipko. I was delighted to join one of these in the Bemru village in 1981. Bemru was way up the steep slope from the Alaknanda Valley; these slopes had a fragile cover formed from ocean sediment. Over time, they had been covered by oak and rhododendron trees that held the soil and water firmly together, preventing erosion or landslides. It was dotted by tiny villages settled on the plateaus. It was the dream of Mahatma Gandhi that India would come to be constituted as a Republic of such self-reliant villages, a vision that inspired Chandi Prasad.

A procession of Chipko activists in Reni village on March 31, 1974. (photo courtesy Shekhar Pathak)

All of us in the camp worked without any distinction of class or caste, and in the evenings, we sat down to discuss what was happening in the Alakananda valley and what our response should be. There was free discussion in simple language led by a physics professor from Gopeshwar College, but stonemasons who fabricated the water mills also provided their inputs. Unfortunately, the government had a monopoly on water resources, and its only interest was to construct giant projects like Tehri to supply power to the national Capital.

A major source of strength of Garhwal villages was the van panchayats under their control. The powers that be were bent upon suppressing movements like Chipko lest their influence spread and challenged the ruling class’s development model of favouring the rich at the cost of people and nature. They now had in hand the 1972 Wildlife Protection Act extending the power of the forest department over the entire country. This was used to render van panchayats dysfunctional and to harass the Chipko activists. This was brought home to me in 1993 when I accompanied Chandi Prasad on a visit to Lata, the village of Gaura Devi, who led the hugging of trees to prevent their being cut. We were stunned when a group of villagers stopped us on the boundary shouting: “Chandi Prasad, wapas jao” (Chandi Prasad, go back). When the atmosphere cooled, we entered the village to understand what had been happening. They told us that the level of harassment of the villagers by the forest department had increased after the village women’s participation in the Chipko Movement. Taking advantage of the fact that Lata lay in the buffer zone of Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, they cut off the villagers’ access to all forest resources, leaving them worse off than they had been before Chipko. The foresters’ action was a complete perversion of the biosphere reserve concept developed by UNESCO, which visualises the government machinery and local communities working together for conservation—compatible development.

While the protest from the Himalayas was snuffed out, it stimulated a different kind of people’s movement, this time by the Marxist Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP). Inspired by Chipko, KSSP embraced the slogan “Science for social revolution” in 1976. One of its earliest interventions was a documentation of the environmental and social impacts of the Grasim Rayon factory at Mavoor on the Chaliyar river. The factory received bamboo at ₹1 per tonne while the market rate was ₹1,000. Despite this great advantage, the management refused to adopt pollution control measures, citing profitability concerns, and recklessly releasing poisonous effluents into the air and the river. This caused serious health problems and the destruction of livelihoods dependent on shellfisheries, lime kilns, and banana plantations. The pollution control board took no notice, and none of the government laboratories agreed to analyse water samples. Fortunately, the Indian Institute of Science’s labs came forward to analyse the samples and showed that the water had mercury, lead, nickel, cobalt, iron, chromium zinc, and copper levels above the permissible limit. This helped strengthen local resistance, which forced the factory to close after a long struggle

KSSP’s most effective intervention was in Silent Valley, a unique natural ecosystem. Its interdisciplinary study showed that energy conservation would be more cost-effective in making available the amount of energy that the project might generate. Its public science parliament in 1980 attracted a huge crowd that engaged in a lively discussion. This, in part, made Silent Valley a celebrated environmental cause and eventually persuaded the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to drop the project.

KSSP vigorously participated in the literacy mission launched in 1986 and followed this up with the panchayat-level resource mapping programme for neo-literates. This was followed by the People’s Planning Campaign of 1995-96 in which every panchayat of Kerala mapped its natural, social and financial resources and developed a locally appropriate management programme. This became the model for the Biological Diversity Act provision of Biodiversity Management Committees in all local bodies in the country. This was used by the Kadanad panchayat in Kottayam, which demonstrated that rock quarries would damage local biodiversity. This documentation was accepted by the Kerala high court, which recommended in 2012 that rock quarries be banned. Regrettably, vested interests forced the panchayat to withdraw its objection; but, an important step had been taken.

Given the smartphone and social media penetration in the country today, a WhatsApp group of panchayats of Kerala serves to promote the preparation of people’s biodiversity registers as a device for local communities to decide on management options for their own local ecosystems. The spark that Chipko Andolan lit 50 years ago is thus promising to ignite fires far and wide.

Madhav Gadgil is an ecologist and founded the Centre for Ecological Studies at the Indian Institute of Science. The views expressed are personal