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When one hears the word, ‘Chipko’, images spring to mind of women and children forming protective rings around trees, saving them from loggers with saws and other terrifying machinery. A largely 70s movement that followed Gandhian principles of satyragraha, and one of the first where women played pivotal roles, it was an ecological spark that spread across northern India, with far reaching effects the world over.
Source: savageonline.co.uk
The Chipko Movement was ecofeminism at its finest, with women the lynchpins that held the movement together. This was unsurprising, since they were most affected by the lack of firewood, fodder and water, and the loss of livelihood. Since logging contractors were the main source of liquor for the men of these communities, larger social issues also came to be included in the movement.
Source: wagingnonviolence.org
Though it is the 45th anniversary of the modern Chipko Movement that began in modern day Uttarakhand, with Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sundarlal Bahuguna the names associated with it, Chipko has it roots in eighteenth century Rajasthan, where hundreds of people from the Bishnoi community protested the logging of the khejri trees with their lives. Where the Bishnois were successful by getting a royal decree banning the cutting of trees in their villages, the modern day Chipko Movement, which gained traction under Sundarlal Bahuguna, saw in 1980, the Indira Gandhi government issue a fifteen year ban on the felling trees in the Himalayas, until the denuded forests were restored.
Source: Wikipedia
The Chipko Movement was a non-violent uprising that successfully mitigated the rampant deforestation to feed the globalised commercial machine. The agitation by villagers and forest communities which saw that the ecological balance was maintained, is a laudable legacy for India’s civil society today.
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