A Mountain Childhood
Sunderlal Bahuguna was born on January 9, 1927, in the village of Maroda near Tehri in what is now Uttarakhand, India. He grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, with a daily, intimate relationship to the mountain forests.
As a young man he was deeply shaped by Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance and the Sarvodaya movement, which pushed for the uplift of all people through self-reliance and community action.
Bahuguna became politically active early. He joined the Indian independence movement as a teenager. After independence he turned to social reform in the hill communities of Uttarakhand. Caste discrimination. Alcoholism. Village-level work.
That grassroots work showed him how completely mountain villagers depended on healthy forests. Water. Fuel. Fodder. The stability of steep Himalayan slopes. When commercial logging began claiming those forests in the 1960s and 1970s, Bahuguna saw the threat as both ecological and existential.
Chipko
In 1973 a pivotal confrontation unfolded in the village of Mandal in Chamoli district. The Indian government had awarded a logging contract to a sporting goods company. The company had the right to fell ash trees the village relied on.
When the loggers arrived, villagers, many of them women led by local activist Gaura Devi, physically embraced the trees to stop them from being cut. The act gave birth to the Chipko movement. The name comes from the Hindi for "to cling" or "to hug."
Bahuguna became the movement's most prominent voice. He undertook a series of long padyatras, marches on foot, covering thousands of kilometers through remote Himalayan villages to build awareness and solidarity.
His message was direct. The forests belonged to the people who lived among them, not to distant commercial interests. Forests, he said, are the sources of soil, water, and pure oxygen. The basic necessities of life. No economic calculation could replace them.
The political victory came in 1980. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, responding to public pressure Bahuguna had helped build, imposed a 15-year ban on commercial green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh.
The moratorium was one of the first times an Indian government acknowledged that standing forest was worth more than timber revenue. Chipko became an international symbol of grassroots environmental resistance and inspired similar forest movements around the world.
Tehri Dam
Bahuguna continued his activism well beyond Chipko. He spent decades opposing the Tehri Dam on the Bhagirathi River, a tributary of the Ganges. The massive hydroelectric project, he argued, would devastate the fragile Himalayan ecosystem and displace thousands of families.
The dam was ultimately completed. His sustained campaign drew national and international attention to the environmental costs of large infrastructure in ecologically sensitive regions.
Legacy
For a lifetime of service, Bahuguna received the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honor. He died on May 21, 2021, at 94.
His legacy lives in the forests he saved, the global environmental movement he helped seed, and the simple idea at the heart of Chipko. Ordinary people, standing together and standing firm, can protect the natural world from destruction.