Speaking at an event ‘Mountain Dialogues’ on July 26 in New Delhi, the former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir NN Vohra made a strong plea for a campaign to save the Himalayas. Mr. Vohra, who was earlier the President of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (apart from holding senior positions in the Home and Defense Ministries) questioned existing development trends and said that we ought to be concentrating on planting millions of trees in this ecologically endangered region.

He was supported by Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary, who is known for his keen interest in ecological issues and was chairing the event. Mr. Saran, who is presently President of India International Centre, added: “We need a national movement to save the Himalayas and the IIC would be very happy to join this effort.” For this writer, this brings back memories of the late 1970s and the 1980s when he was covering the Chipko movement and its follow-up actions in Tehri Garhwal district and came close to the group of Gandhian or Sarvodaya workers including Vimla and Sunderlal Bahuguna, Dhum Singh Negi, Kunwar Prasun, Vijay Jardhari, and others. Of course there were several Chipko groups in various districts but I was involved more with this group.

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There were several movements in forests like Advani, Salet, Badiyargad, Kangar etc. where villagers (particularly women) and activists rushed to hug trees to protect them from the axe of the contactor and his men, or where there were fasts to protest against indiscriminate tree felling. Earlier, villagers including women protested against the auction of trees and courted arrest. The movement remained non-violent in the midst of the various provocations. After the initial success – with the government announcing a ban on commercial tree felling above a certain height – Sunderlal Bahuguna embarked on a Kashmir to Kohima foot march. Although chief ministers like Virbhadra Singh and Farooq Abdullah welcomed him personally, this was a very risky undertaking in the course of which at times he came close to death.

As he told me, he had taken this up to get a first-hand view of the extent of ecological ruin in the Himalayan region of India and Nepal. In Delhi, he got a very good response from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who was very open to suggestions for protecting Himalayan ecology. Later, the struggle against the Tehri Dam proved so difficult that some other aspects of this campaign could not receive as much as attention as needed. Nevertheless while living with and learning from these Gandhian activists, I absorbed a very important aspect of campaigning for saving Himalayan ecology – namely that this should be deeply based among people and should not be an elitist campaign.

These activists were interacting all the time closely with people regarding their most urgent issues. If one day they were in action to protect trees, then the next they would be involved in saving indigenous trees, a day after in opposing liquor vends, and the next day in regeneration of degraded land. In other words, they were close to people and responded to their needs. This is how what appeared to be impossible at one stage became a reality. Women who seldom ventured out of their villages became willing to even go to prison and to confront policemen and contractors in forests. A true campaign should be a truly people-based campaign. Later when I was asked to participate in some elitist campaigns, I could see that they were not able to present issues and demands in ways that were favourable to the needs of people. As a new campaign may emerge soon, its pro-people orientation should get special emphasis.

Talking only of ecology while ignoring the needs of people will not take us very far. The Indian Himalayas stretch majestically for nearly 2,500 km. Over 50 million people live here, but the number of people whose life is closely influenced by the Himalayas is many times more. For all their grandeur, the Himalayas are geologically young and fragile formations, prone to disturbances and landslides. Most of this region falls in the highest seismic zone. Hence policies for this region should take extra care to be protective towards the environment. At the national level, people tend to discuss the Himalayan region in terms of tourism and pilgrimage destinations, but greater attention should be given to the lives and livelihoods of common people living in the region as well as the need to protect the environment. The Himalayas with their varying heights and slopes, peaks and valleys are suitable for preserving rich biodiversity.

Traditional farming practices have made good use of this to provide a diversity of nutritious food, which is particularly rich in millets and herbs. Some farm scientists who were trained in green revolution monocultures could not appreciate these strengths and so disruptive new crops and technologies were introduced at some places. Fortunately this mistake is being realized by many. There are several initiatives to base farming more on organic and natural methods. This is welcome, but often a holistic approach of natural farming is missing in official efforts. Forests are crucial for protecting Himalayan ecology, but with due care and understanding, they can also play the most important role in supporting sustainable livelihoods of local people.

This would be based on providing people livelihoods in protecting forests and biodiversity, regenerating mixed natural forests with due place for more soil and water-conserving indigenous trees like the oak, and giving people better rights over sustainable use of minor forest produce. A rural economy based on such protective livelihoods, fruits and dry fruits, organic farm produce in raw and processed forms, and supported by eco-friendly tourism and pilgrimage can provide a firm livelihood base without endangering the environment. Unfortunately not just tourism but even pilgrimages are getting commercialised, with record numbers of helicopter sorties bringing pilgrims to their favoured shrines.

Instead of allowing all this to be guided mainly by commercial factors, we must bring in important factors like protecting the environment and promoting livelihoods of common hill people. There has been a lot of controversy around several big development projects, particularly dam and highway projects. A time has come when the government should make room for a completely unbiased evaluation of the overall impact of these projects so that future policy is guided entirely by the unbiased conclusions that can be drawn from the experiences so far.

There are several concerns – loss of forests and trees, destabilization of slopes and land-slides, displacement of people among them – but a particularly serious concern is that of avoiding any massive disasters. The role which hydel projects had played in aggravating the highly disastrous floods in Uttarakhand in 2013 has been widely discussed and even a committee appointed at the initiative of the Supreme Court had drawn attention to this. We cannot forget that at least 6,000 lives were lost in these floods. Sadly, the possibility of even bigger disasters still exists, given present conditions.

A top priority should be to avoid such disasters. More than one officially appointed committee has drawn attention to very serious risks associated with the Tehri Dam Project in Uttarakhand, for instance, and we should not ignore or neglect such well-documented warnings. Sunderlal Bahuguna used to say that the ecology is a permanent economy. He is no more, but we still have amidst us Vimla Bahuguna and other senior activists who had hugged trees to save them at the peak of the Chipko movement. We must seek their guidance and prepare for a campaign to save Himalayan ecology through a people-oriented campaign.

(The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071.)