In the early 1970s, when
industrial giants attempted to spread their tentacles into the forest lands of
Uttarakhand (then Uttar Pradesh), they were met with one of the biggest
environmental movements in Indian history. The Chipko Movement started off under the leadership of Gaura Devi, a
middle-aged Bhotia woman, who managed to mobilise about 30 women of her village
to step out of their homes and protect the green cover of their lands with
their lives. Challenging the men to shoot them down before touching the
trees, they forced them to retreat. The movement was soon acknowledged by the
government of India, and they forced the company to withdraw from the region.
The Chipko Movement was based on
an ideology of protecting the environment with one’s blood and bones. Historically speaking, it had been inspired
by a movement that had sparked off in 1730 AD in a small village close to
Jodhpur in Rajasthan. When the ruler
of Marwar, Maharaja Abhay Singh, ordered cutting down of the local Khejri trees for the sake of building
his new palace, Amrita Devi, along
with her three young daughters, laid down their lives in protest. They soon
inspired large sections of their community to follow in protest. In the ensuing
days, more than 350 lives were lost as
the king’s men mercilessly chopped down bodies that were shielding the valuable
Khejri trees with complete devotion.
On March 26, 1973, Gaura Devi and
the other women in the Reni forest region
of Uttarakhand followed the footsteps of Amrita Devi, and in the process
laid down a legacy of environmental protection that was one of a kind. The
Chipko movement of 1973 soon inspired many such agitations of ecological
protection. In the immediate aftermath, it soon spread to other sub-Himalayan
regions like in Gopeshwar (1975),
Bhynder valley (1978) and Dongri Paintoli (1980).
In the following decades,
however, the movement found itself being echoed in varying capacities in large
parts of India and the world. Here are three such environmental movements which
were inspired by the Chipko movement.
Appiko movement (Karnataka)
On September 8, 1983, the environmental activist Pandurang Hegde initiated a revolt against the agricultural practice of
monoculture, which entailed the growing of a single tree in large areas. Appiko, which in the local language
meant ‘to hug’, was a method that
Hegde owed to the Chipko movement and actively propagated in his region through
local folklore. Through the non-violent practise of hugging trees in order to
prevent them from being felled, soon became part of the local culture in the
region and overtime played an instrumental
role in saving a rather eco-sensitive habitat of the Western Ghats.
Campaign to save trees in
North 24 Parganas (West Bengal)
As recent as April 2017, the
Chipko Movement was yet again replicated by a group of young boys and girls in
West Bengal. When the local administration decided to cut down close to 4000
trees on the NH112 to turn the two-lane highway into a four-lane one, hundreds
of students protested by forming mini human chains around the trees, protecting
them from the axe of the government.
Chipko movement in Japan
In 2009, the Japanese too
followed the Chipko way, when the local population staged a strong protest against the building of a
tunnel near Mount Takao. They too adopted the tree-hugging method to resist
the agenda of the local administration.
Credit: Indian Express Research
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