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Chipko is often told as a story about people hugging trees. The more interesting part is why they did it: villagers in the Garhwal Himalaya had worked out that losing forest on steep slopes meant losing soil, water and safety. This post covers what happened, who led it, and the forest science that made their case.
What was the Chipko movement?
The Right Livelihood Foundation's laureate page describes Chipko as a non-violent movement to protect India's forests, using Gandhian satyagraha. The first demonstration took place in the Himalayan region in 1973, when people hugged trees to save them from being cut down; "chipko" means "to hug" or "to embrace". It was the result of hundreds of local, autonomous actions, and its activists were mainly village women, partly because many men had left the hills to find work.
A paper by Shiva and Bandyopadhyay (1986) in Mountain Research and Development traces Chipko from its start in Garhwal in the early 1970s and notes, in its abstract, that it was based on "sustainable ecological stability" and "dominated by women".
Why did the women of Reni stand in front of the axes?
An FAO publication on women and forestry explains the turn. More women joined Chipko "when they realized that the recurring floods and landslides from which they were suffering were caused by deforestation." When the Forest Department announced an auction of 2,500 trees in the Reni forest above the Alaknanda river, which had already flooded disastrously, Gaura Devi organised the women of her village and they physically prevented the felling. The FAO account adds that women later set up cooperatives to guard local forests and ran nurseries stocked with species they chose.
What is the science linking forests, slopes and floods?
Three ideas from biology and geography explain what the villagers saw.
Roots hold soil. Plant roots act like reinforcing fibres in soil. A review in Plant and Soil by Stokes and colleagues (2009) notes that slope stability models include vegetation, and that root distribution, length, orientation and diameter all influence how well roots fix soil against shallow landslides.
Canopy and litter slow water. Leaves intercept rain, and leaf litter on the forest floor slows the water that reaches the ground, so more of it soaks in instead of rushing off the surface.
Lost soil has to go somewhere. Soil washed off a cleared hillside is carried down into streams and rivers as sediment, which is why a muddy river after rain is a sign of erosion upstream.
Put together, a cleared Himalayan slope sheds soil and water faster. That is the chain the Reni women described in their own words. Vandana Shiva, quoted on the Right Livelihood page, put the policy result this way: Chipko "woke them to the ecological functions of the forests in the catchments of our rivers."
Who was Sunderlal Bahuguna?
The same Right Livelihood page gives his story. Born on 9 January 1927, he was a Gandhian activist who first campaigned against the caste system. Walking through the hills in the 1960s, he became aware of the damage deforestation was doing in the Himalayas. In 1972 he began to mobilise against mass tree felling, and from 1981 to 1983 he made a 5,000-kilometre trans-Himalayan foot march from Kashmir to Kohima to spread the Chipko message.
The page credits him as instrumental in Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 1980 decision to impose a 15-year ban on green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh. He later led hunger strikes against the Tehri dam, proposed a Himalayan policy of slopes covered with trees for food, fodder, fuel and timber, and received the Padma Vibhushan in 2009. He died on 21 May 2021, aged 94. The Chipko Movement received the Right Livelihood Award in 1987.
What do students often get wrong about Chipko?
"Bahuguna founded it alone." The movement was decentralised, and village women did much of the work. Bahuguna was one of its most widely known voices, alongside many others.
"It was about saving trees for their own sake." The women were protecting fodder, fuel, water and safe slopes. The ecology and the livelihoods were the same problem.
"It only happened once." Chipko-style protests spread to other parts of India, and the page notes young people still use the idea today.
For the NEET and CBSE view of why forests and species matter, our guide to biodiversity and conservation covers protected areas and the main causes of biodiversity loss. For another life in Indian environmental science, read about T. N. Khoshoo.
What can a student take from Chipko?
Chipko is a lesson in reading cause and effect from careful local observation, then testing it against what happens when you change one thing. The villagers connected felling to floods long before policy did.
If ideas like soil erosion or water run-off are hard to picture from a textbook paragraph, the Fermi Concept Library has every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing with its own lesson, so you can fill in the gap before you go back to your chapter.
Next time it rains, compare the water running off a bare patch of ground with the water under a tree nearby, and write down what you see.
