Understanding ‘Chipko’: the Himalayan people's movement for forest conservation

Chipko is a rural, non‐government, popular organisation devoted to forest conservation and rural development in Uttarakhand. Its main supporters are rural women who are worried about the decline of their agro‐ecosystem. This requires the preservation of an adequate balance between arable and forest land, which supplies fuel, fodder, and hence manure for the fields. Today, this balance is wrong, the forest land is being degraded and the arable land supplies little more than a half of the village's needs. Concern for such problems has been mobilised and focussed by the region's network of Gandhian social (sarvodaya) workers. Gandhian methods of protest have given the rural women a powerful political voice. In return, this has given the Gandhians a major platform for their vision of the sarvodaya society and an avenue for the implementation of some of their policies.