Sundarlal Bahuguna Walked 4,870 Kilometres From Kashmir to Kohima for the Himalayan Forests, Declined the Padma Shri in 1981 and Was Named a Padma Vibhushan in 2009

Sundarlal Bahuguna (1927 to 2021) walked 4,870 kilometres from Kashmir to Kohima between 1981 and 1983 to argue for the Himalayan forests, according to the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation, which gave him its 1986 award for constructive work. He declined the Padma Shri in 1981. The Press Information Bureau’s list of 25 January 2009 names him among that year’s Padma Vibhushan awardees, under Environment Conservation, from Uttarakhand. The Chipko movement he became the best-known face of had other leaders, and the record credits each of them for different things.

A boy from Tehri who was in jail at 17

The Bajaj Foundation’s biography says Bahuguna was born in 1927 in a small village in Tehri Garhwal district. Shridev Suman, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, drew him into public life. He took part in the freedom movement at 13 and was imprisoned at 17, and he later served as general secretary of the Tehri Rajya Prajamandal and the district Congress committee.

In 1949 he met Mira Behn and Thakkar Bapa and started a school for scavengers, which drew anger from relatives and friends and severe opposition from the upper castes. In 1956 he gave up party politics, married Vimla Nautiyal, and settled in the village of Silyara. The couple’s work followed the constructive programme Gandhi had laid out: hostels, temple-entry campaigns and women’s work.

On a call from Vinoba Bhave in 1960 he walked through seven hill districts, and the biography says those marches showed him how badly the upper catchments of the Himalayan rivers had been stripped. In 1971 he fasted for 16 days against the reopening of liquor shops, and five districts were declared dry.

Mandal, April 1973: the cooperative that started it

Chandi Prasad Bhatt founded the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (called Sangh in later accounts) in 1964 at Gopeshwar, in Chamoli district, to give villagers forest-based work such as making farm tools from ash wood. The Ramon Magsaysay Award citation says a cloudburst after 20 July 1970 raised the Alaknanda river sharply and made him aware of what indiscriminate felling does. The same district holds Badrinath, which the tuput piece on the Char Dham routes covers.

Shobita Jain, writing in the FAO’s journal Unasylva after fieldwork in 1982, reports that the Forest Department refused the society’s request for 10 ash trees and allotted 300 to a sporting-goods company. The India Environment Portal’s chronology records what followed on 24 April 1973: villagers of Mandal, led by Bhatt and the society, stopped the Symonds company’s contractors from felling ash trees. It marks the entry “Chipko is born.”

The Magsaysay Foundation, which gave Bhatt its 1982 award for community leadership, credits him with mobilising villagers in 1973 to force a revision of forest policies dating from 1917. It also records the movement’s first slogan, “cut us before you cut the tree.”

Bhatt’s society went on to run eco-development camps where villagers planned their needs around the forest’s balance and planted trees. The Magsaysay citation says trees planted by villagers survived at a much higher rate than government plantings, and Jain gives the figure as 85 to 90 percent, with over a million trees planted.

Reni, 26 March 1974: Gaura Devi and the women

The Forest Department auctioned nearly 2,500 trees at Reni, a village above the Alaknanda, according to Jain. The India Environment Portal says that on 26 March 1974 the women of Reni, led by Gaura Devi, blocked the agents of the contractor Jagmohan Bhalla from entering the Peng Murenda forest.

Shekhar Pathak, the historian of the movement, gives the fuller scene in The Tribune. Gaura Devi, then 50 and head of the village Mahila Mangal Dal (women’s welfare group), led about 20 women and seven girls to the forest. Pathak records her telling a forest official, using the word maika for a woman’s mother’s home, to shoot her and take away her maika. The women’s stand stopped the felling.

Ramachandra Guha writes that she was widowed early, never went to school, started her village’s Mahila Mangal Dal in 1965, and died in 1991. He calls Reni perhaps the most iconic Chipko protest.

Bhatt and others reached Reni the next morning, 27 March, according to Pathak, and a demonstration followed on 31 March. Jain reports that the Uttar Pradesh government set up an expert committee and then placed a ten-year ban on all tree felling in an area of over 1,150 square kilometres.

Reni was not the last women-led stop. Jain lists a demonstration by the women of Dongri Paintoli on 9 February 1980 that stopped tree felling, and reports that the government halted the felling nine days later. She also quotes a village leader’s estimate that 90 percent of the women supported the movement and 90 percent of the men opposed it.

Who named it, and who was where

Credit for the word and the movement is not settled. The Bajaj biography says that in 1972 Bahuguna took up the forest problem, urged people to protest without violence and gave the call “Chipko,” which means hug the trees. Pathak’s chronology says the term was first used in 1973. Down To Earth quotes Bahuguna himself as saying village women started the movement and that he joined later. Neither Pathak’s Reni account nor the India Environment Portal chronology places him at Reni or Mandal.

The Edinburgh review of Pathak’s book, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, says Pathak set out to give weight to women, students, Sarvodaya workers and local party members, not only the famous names. It also reports Pathak’s remark that Dhoom Singh Negi was “perhaps the only person to actually hug a tree.” Jain describes Bhatt as a grass-roots organiser from Gopeshwar and Bahuguna as a journalist from Silyara who focused on publicity and ecological priorities. The Right Livelihood Foundation gave its 1987 award to the Chipko movement as a whole, not to any one person, and calls Bahuguna the most prominent leader to emerge from it.

Marches, fasts and a refused honour

Bahuguna’s own record, as the Bajaj biography gives it, is mostly on foot. He walked 1,400 kilometres in 120 days in 1973, 2,800 kilometres in 1975 (both in Uttarakhand), and 4,870 kilometres from Kashmir to Kohima in 1981 to 1983. The India Environment Portal lists a hunger strike that he began on 9 January 1979 against felling in the Badyargarh forests of Tehri, which ended on 31 January when the contractors withdrew and he was released from jail. Scientists invited him to the Science Congress at Varanasi in 1981, the biography says.

The same biography states that he was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981 and turned it down. Down To Earth gives his reason as the politicians’ failure to act on his proposal for a Himalaya policy; the biography quotes him as saying he would stay unfit for such an award while Himalayan topsoil kept washing to the sea after felling. He accepted the Padma Vibhushan in 2009, Down To Earth reports, hoping it would give weight to the same proposal.

A ban whose date depends on who you ask

Several sources credit the campaign with stopping green felling in the Uttar Pradesh hills, which then included today’s Uttarakhand. They disagree on when and for how long.

The India Environment Portal’s chronology says Bahuguna began a fast in April 1981 demanding a complete ban on green felling above 1,000 metres, that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi set up an expert committee, and that its report led to a 15-year moratorium on commercial felling in the Uttarakhand Himalaya. Pathak’s chronology in The Tribune places a ban on green felling above 1,000 metres under the Forest Conservation Act of 1980. Earth.Org also dates a ten-year ban to 1980. A Down To Earth report of 1993 says the Uttar Pradesh government imposed its ban on felling above 1,000 metres in June 1983, on recommendations from the Union agriculture ministry. The Bajaj biography says only that the Uttar Pradesh government eventually had to stop felling green trees above 1,000 metres for commercial purposes. Goldsmith writes in Resurgence that Bahuguna and Vimla secured the moratorium together.

The review of Pathak’s book adds a point against the tidy version. It says Pathak regards the Forest Conservation Act of 1980 as a blow to the movement, because forest dwellers found it harder to get even basic resources from the forests under it. It also reports Pathak’s view that state-sponsored honours given to individuals or groups brought friction among the activists.

Tehri and the last years

In the 1990s Bahuguna fasted against the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi. Goldsmith reports that he called off a 45-day fast in 1995 after Prime Minister Rao promised an independent review, and that the promise was broken. A second fast ended on its 74th day in 1996, when Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda agreed to appoint two review committees, one drawn up by Bahuguna. The dam was expected to displace 25,000 people, she writes. The river he fought for appears in tuput’s account of the Ganga clean-up.

He died of Covid-19 at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh, on 21 May 2021, Down To Earth’s obituary reports, and the Right Livelihood Foundation gives his age as 94. The Prime Minister’s tweet, which the Press Information Bureau released that day, called his death “a monumental loss for our nation.”