Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chipko Movement

The 94-year-old environmentalist succumbed to Covid-19 on May 21, 2021, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Rishikesh, Uttarakhand. With his demise, India has lost one of the finest environmentalists and social workers who had also been part of India’s freedom movement.

About Sundarlal Bahuguna

• Born in village Maroda near Tehri, Uttarakhand on January 9, 1927, he was an active revolutionary during the Indian Freedom Struggle.
• Early in his life, Sunderlal Bahuguna met Gandhian Sridev Suman, who later died while on a long fast of 84 days against the atrocities of Tehri’s king, and that made a deep impression on Bahuguna. It moulded his political and social understanding. He vowed to work for the weak and powerless in a non-violent manner and practised what he preached.
• He adopted Gandhian principles in his life. Inspired by Gandhi, he walked through Himalayan forests and hills, covering more than 4,700 kilometres on foot and observed the damage done by mega developmental projects to the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas and the subsequent degradation of social life in villages.
• Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, he fought against untouchability and to do so in true spirit he lived with Dalits (formerly untouchables) in the same house and ate with them.
• He was also part of the anti-liquor movement in the 1960s and of course, you can’t forget the Sarvodaya movement he actively participated in,” Sarvodaya movement is rooted in Gandhian philosophy of upliftment of all.
• He fought for the preservation of forests in the Himalayas, first as a member of the Chipko movement in the 1970s which started in Chamoli district and later spearheaded the anti-Tehri Dam movement from the 1980s to early 2004.
• He was the District President of Congress. Resigned from there, he and his wife Vimla Bahuguna founded Parvtiya Navjivan Mandal and worked for the education of Dalits and the poor.
• He was a charismatic ascetic, a spartan man of Gandhian principles. He lived in a small ashram, denounced violence and was essentially non-political. He believed in self-reliance and not in "so much foreign trade". He despised materialism.
• To become energy secure in a "non-violent and permanent society", he said, India needed to produce biogas from human waste, harvest solar and wind energy and hydropower from the run of the river. Improve machines so they consume less energy,
• Mr. Bahuguna also led the charge against the construction of big dams in the Himalayas in the 1980s. He was fervently opposed to the construction of the Tehri dam and sat on two long hunger strikes against the dam, which proved to be of no avail.
• Mr Bahuguna, who lived for decades in his Silyara ashram in Tehri Garhwal, inspired many young people with his passion for the environment. His ashram was open to young people, with whom he communicated with ease.
• He wrote about the problems of deforestation for years — drawing a link between the lack of tree cover and the drying up of springs in the Himalayas. He also led a movement of women’s groups, or Mahila manuals, to enforce prohibition in Tehri Garhwal, which was then part of Uttar Pradesh.
• Dressed in khadi, sporting a flowing white beard and a jhola on his shoulder, Mr. Bahuguna toured the length and breadth of India carrying his message of “save the Himalayas” to whoever would listen to him.
• Bahuguna believed in a cohesive and coordinated conservation policy for the entire Himalayan belt. It was this belief of his that he did a 5,000-kilometre-long foot-march between 1981-83 from Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir in northern India to Kohima in Nagaland in eastern India.

Chipko Movement

• He was one of the founders of the Chipko, or hug the tree movement, in the 1970s to save Himalayan forests.
• It was a non-violent agitation which originated in Uttar Pradesh’s Chamoli district (now Uttarakhand) in 1973.
• He wrote that deforestation led to erosion of fertile land and pushed the men out of the villages to look for jobs in cities. This left women to "bear all the responsibilities of collecting fodder, firewood and water, apart from farming".
• Not surprisingly, the Chipko movement became an important milestone in the fight to secure women's rights.
• Heeding calls by Bahuguna and fellow activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt, men and women in the Indian Himalayas embraced and chained themselves to trees to stop loggers from cutting them down. It was a powerful symbol that conveyed, 'Our bodies before our trees'.
• The name of the movement ‘chipko’ comes from the word ’embrace’, as the villagers hugged the trees and encircled them to prevent being hacked.
• It is best remembered for the collective mobilisation of women for the cause of preserving forests, which also brought about a change in attitude regarding their own status in society.
• Very soon, women in the Himalayas became an integral part of the movement too, embracing trees and tying rakhis - a symbolic red thread tied around a brother's wrist during the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan - onto the bark of trees. They walked in the snow and took away tools from loggers to stop felling.
• It’s biggest victory was making people aware of their rights to forests, and how grassroots activism can influence policy-making regarding ecology and shared natural resources.
• It yielded results: a fast in 1981 led to a 15-year ban on commercial felling of trees in Uttarakahand. Two years later, he marched 4,000km (2,500 miles) in the Himalayas to draw attention to environmental degradation.
• It led to a ban on commercial felling of trees above 30 degrees slope and above 1,000 msl (mean sea level) in 1981.
• In 1987, he was conferred with Padma Shri but he refused to accept it over Government’s refusal to cancel the Tehri dam project despite his protests.
• Chipko movement threw many stalwarts like Govind Singh Rawat, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Vipin Tripathi, Vidya Sagar Nautiyal and Govind Singh Negi.
• The Chipko Movement received the 1987 Right Livelihood Award, also referred to as the Alternative Nobel Prize, “...for its dedication to the conservation, restoration and ecologically-sound use of India's natural resources.”

Appiko movement

• On September 8, 1983, Pandurang Hegde, an environmental activist from Karnataka, started the Appiko (Kannada for Chipko, "to hug") movement to protest against the felling of trees, monoculture, and deforestation in the Western Ghats, deriving inspiration from Sunderlal Bahugana and the Chipko movement.
• After the Appiko movement started, Bahuguna and Pandurang Hegde walked across many parts of south India promoting the conservation of ecology, especially the protection of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot.
• This and the broader Save the Western Ghats Movement led to a moratorium on green felling across the region in 1989.