at Gopeshwar that had been deeply involved in these protests began to organize a series of ecodevelopment camps in the Alakananda valley in Garhwal as a follow up. I participated in one of these in 1981 and witnessed volunteers working shoulder to shoulder with local villagers to undertake soil and water conservation works, to build stone fences and to plant seedlings of a vanety of local species of value to people. A comparative assessment of the performance of these people’s plantations of early 1980s and plantations in similar terrain by the Forestry establishment was undertaken by the Space Application Center, Ahmedabad using satellite imagery, and by my colleague S. Narendra Prasad and myself through field studies. The people’s plantations were far more successful, and we found that the percentage of survival in people’s plantations was around 80%, while that in official plantations stood around 20%.
So Chipko and their Van Panchayats became a prime target of forces of destructive development. The Forest Department made it a point to harass leaders of Chipko Movement, including Gaura Devi from Lata-Reni villages. S. Narendra Prasad who had earlier documented the excellent performance of the ecodevelopment camps of Chipko volunteers visited those localities again a decade later and reported that the Forest Department’s sabotaging the Van Panchayats had led to degradation of this habitat of goral and other ungulates. A tragic consequence of our allowing all this destruction to go on has been the awful landslide of Chamoli in February 2021 that has caused floeding in the Chamoli district and led to the death of 204 people.
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