Sunderlal Bahuguna

( Jan 09 1927 - May 21 2021 )

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Achievements

Sunderlal Bahuguna (9 January 1927 – 21 May 2021) was an Indian environmentalist and Chipko movement leader. ... He fought 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 from the 1980s to early 2004. Bahuguna, who died with Covid-19 on Thursday aged 94, was known the world over as the man who taught Indians to hug trees to protect the environment. He was one of the main leaders of the Chipko movement in northern India in the 1970s. In Hindi, chipko literally means "hugging". Heeding calls by Bahuguna and fellow activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt, men and women in the Indian Himalayas embraced and chained themselves to trees to stop loggers from cutting them down. It was a powerful symbol that conveyed, 'Our bodies before our trees'. It also became a movement that brought to the world's attention the devastation wrought by the environmental crisis in the world's highest mountains. Bahuguna was a charismatic ascetic, a spartan man of Gandhian principles. He lived in a small ashram, denounced violence and was essentially non-political. He believed in self-reliance and not in "so much foreign trade". He despised materialism. To become energy secure in a "non-violent and permanent society", he said, India needed to produce biogas from human waste, harvest solar and wind energy and hydro power from the run of the river. Improve machines so they consume less energy, he suggested. Born in 1927 in Tehri district in what is now Uttarakhand, Bahuguna grew up surrounded by sal, oak and fir trees and sweeping pasture lands. Amit Baruah, a former BBC colleague, remembers a school trip as teenage student in the late 1970s to meet Bahuguna in the Himalayas and see his work. What he found was not someone seeking conflict or controversy, but an easy-going, gentle and soft-spoken man, who had made the "early link between cutting of trees and drying up of the springs in the Himalayas".

Profession

Indian environmentalist and Chipko movement leader

Address

Maroda