Sunderlal Bahuguna is a noted Garhwalienvironmentalist and Chipko movement leader. The idea of Chipko movement was of his wife and the action was taken by him. For years he has been fighting for the preservation of forests in the Himalayas, first as a member of the Chipko movement in the 1970s, and later spearheaded the Anti-Tehri Dam movement starting 1980s, to early 2004. He was one of the early environmentalists of India, and later he and people associated with the Chipko movement started taking up environmental issues, like against large dams.
Early life
Sunderlal Bahuguna was born in of village Maroda near Tehri, Uttarakhand on 9 January 1927. He claimed in a function arranged at Kolkata, that his ancestors bearing surname Bandyopadhyaya, migrated from Bengal to Tehri, some 800 years ago. Early on, he fought against untouchability and later started organising hill women in his anti-liquor drive from 1965 to 1970. He started social activities at the age of thirteen, under the guidance of Shri Dev Suman, who was a nationalist spreading message of non-violence and he was with the Congress party of Uttar Pradesh at the time of Independence. Bahuguna also mobilised people against colonial rule before 1947. He adopted Gandhian principles in his life and married his wife Vimla with the condition that they would live among rural people and establish ashram in village. Inspired by Gandhi, he walked through Himalayan forests and hills, covering more than 4,700 kilometres on foot and observed the damage done by mega developmental projects on the fragile eco-system of the Himalayas and subsequent degradation of social life in villages.
Chipko movement
Chipko movement was started on 26 March 1974 spontaneously in Uttar Pradesh, in an effort to save areas of trees and forests from cutting by forest contractors. In Hindi, "Chipko" literally means "hug" and people started hugging and holding onto trees when it was being cut. Chipko movement. One of Sunderlal Bahuguna's notable contributions to that cause, and to environmentalism in general, was his creation of the Chipko's slogan "Ecology is permanent economy." Sunderlal Bahuguna helped bring the movement to prominence through about 5,000-kilometer trans-Himalaya march undertaken from 1981 to 1983, travelling from village to village, gathering support for the movement. He had an appointment with the then Indian Prime MinisterIndira Gandhi and that meeting is credited with resulting in Mrs. Gandhi's subsequent 15-year ban on cutting of green trees in 1980. He was also closely associated with Gaura Devi, one of the pioneers of the movement.
He has remained behind the anti-Tehri Dam protests for decades, he used the Satyagraha methods, and repeatedly went on hunger strikes at the banks of Bhagirathi as a mark of his protest. In 1995, he called off a 45-day-long fast following an assurance from the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao of the appointment of a review committee on the ecological impacts of the dam. Thereafter he went on another long fast which lasted for 74 days at Gandhi Samadhi, Raj Ghat, during the tenure of Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, who gave personal undertaking of project review. However, despite a court case which ran in the Supreme Court for over a decade, work resumed at the Tehri dam in 2001, following which he was arrested on 20 April 2001. Eventually, the dam reservoir started filling up in 2004, and on 31 July 2004 he was finally evacuated to a new accommodation at Koti. Later he shifted to the capital city of Uttrakhand, Dehradun and is currently living there with his wife. Sunderlal Bahuguna has been a passionate defender of the Himalayan people, working for temperance, the plight of the hill people. He has also struggled to defend India's rivers.
Awards
1981: Padma Shri Award by government of India, but he refused it.
