Himalayan Environmental Sensitivity and its Impact on the Indian Subcontinent
Chandi Prasad Bhatt, the pioneer of the Chipko Movement, discusses the Himalayan region’s forest sensitivity, linking deforestation to calamities and villagers’ livelihood impact, and proposing conservation measures.
The Chipko Movement originated in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand (then part of Uttar Pradesh) in 1973 and quickly spread throughout the Indian Himalayas.
A movement of environmental consciousness and conservation, the Chipko Movement is against the exploitation of natural resources that increasingly threatens the livelihoods of Indian villagers and questions the wrong policies that govern forest lands. The movement highlighted questions such as forest rights of forest dwellers, the impact of large-scale felling of trees on nature, and the neglect of women in forest management.
To understand this agitation of the general public, it is important to understand how sensitive the central Himalayan region is, how the Himalayan mountain range provides an abundance of soil, water, and vegetation to the Indian subcontinent, and how the forests in the Uttarakhand region has been exploited.
Depriving the people of Uttarakhand of the free use of land, forest, and water began in the 19th century when the British started taking the forest and land from the government’s possession. The commercial exploitation of forests continued after independence, so much so that untouched forest areas started coming under motor roads.
Such exploitation led to landslides and land erosion in the catchment areas of the rivers originating from the Himalayan region, and the rivers began to flood. This led to the death of thousands of people, the destruction of property every year, and also affected development projects. One such event was the devastating flood in Alaknanda on July 20, 1970.
It was from the agitation of the Chipko Movement that, in 1977, the forest department stopped the felling of trees in the sensitive areas of Alaknanda, thereby cancelling the department’s 10-year Working Plan in the region.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt will shed light on how sensitive the forest cover in this Himalayan region is and that deforestation and commercial exploitation have been drastically resulting in natural calamity and affecting the livelihoods of the villagers. He will also talk about ways of conservation in this region.
About the Speaker
Chandi Prasad Bhatt is an Indian Gandhian environmentalist and social activist who founded Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS) in Gopeshwar in 1964. It later became a mother organisation to the Chipko Movement, in which he was one of the pioneers.
For his unparalleled contribution to the movement, he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1982, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2005. Today, he is known for his work on subaltern social ecology and is considered one of India’s first modern environmentalists.