Popular Movements: Chipko, Silent Valley, Narmada and Niyamgiri

In one line

Four movements, of which two produced judgments this book can cite, one produced a statute, and one lost in court and changed the law anyway.

What the question is asking

Two things, and the second is the harder one. The role of popular movements in influencing policy and resource management decisions; and an analysis of instances and of their impact on policy reforms.

So the answer must be causal, not narrative. For each movement: what was contested, what the movement did, what the State did, and what rule of law or policy changed as a result. A chronology of protests without the last element does not answer the question.

Chipko

What was contested. Commercial felling of hill forest in the Garhwal Himalaya, against the local demand that the timber and the forest's protective functions belong to the villages.

What the movement did. Villagers, women prominently among them, physically prevented felling by embracing the trees, from which the movement takes its name.

What changed, so far as this book can ground it. The two claims Chipko made are the two claims the National Forest Policy, 1988, accepted: that the principal aim of forest policy is environmental stability, with direct economic benefit subordinated to it; and that the domestic requirements of fuelwood, fodder, minor forest produce and small timber of the rural and tribal populations are the first charge on forest produce. The policy also directs that contractors be replaced by tribal and labour cooperatives, which is the demand Chipko made about who does the felling.

Read as a resource question, Chipko is a dispute about whether a hill forest is State property to be auctioned or common property whose protective functions belong to the villages below it. Section 35 of the Indian Forest Act had allowed the State to regulate a hillside for the preservation of soil on slopes and the maintenance of water supply in springs since 1927; what Chipko contested was the State's own felling.

Silent Valley

What was contested. A hydroelectric project in an evergreen forest in Kerala.

What the movement did. A campaign by scientists, writers and citizens' bodies against the project on the ground of the forest's ecological value.

What changed, so far as this book can ground it. The project did not proceed and the area was protected. The legal instrument by which such an area is protected is the National Park under section 35 of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, and the instrument that would today require the Central Government's prior approval for the diversion is section 2 of the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, 1980, enacted in the same period.