‘We will always chipko to your beliefs’

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Environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna succumbed to COVID-19, who was pioneer of ‘Chipko Movement’ in 1970s.

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Sunderlal Bahuguna raised his voice against any kind of 'development' that proved detrimental to the forests in Uttarakhand.

Amul dairy company remembered him

• by posting a topical in Bahuguna’s honour that is ‘We will always Chipko to your beliefs’.

Chipko Movement

Bahuguna along with activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt and several men and women in the Indian Himalayas hugged and chained themselves to trees to stop loggers from cutting them down. It was a powerful symbol that conveyed, 'Our bodies before our trees'.

It also became a movement that brought to the world's attention the devastation toil by the environmental crisis in the world's highest mountains.

A disastrous flood in Uttarakhand in 1970 had come as a harsh awakening for villagers. Young men and women too became part of this movement. Women started tying rakhi to the bark of trees. Bahuguna wrote that deforestation led to soil erosion and thus forcing men to migrate to cities for jobs.

His efforts led to ban of 15 years on cutting of trees in 1981. In 1992 he went on to fast to protest for the tallest dam of India- Tehri. His movement has lived on as in Mumbai (2017) 3000 trees were hugged to protect them from being cut.

Sunderlal Bahuguna was a charismatic ascetic, a man of Gandhian principles. He lived in a small ashram, condemned violence and was at heart non-political. He believed in self-reliance and detested materialism.

He opined that to become energy secure in a non-violent and permanent society, India needed to produce biogas from human waste, harvest solar and wind energy and hydro power from the run of the river.