The 1982 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Chandi Prasad Bhatt

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
Manila, Philippines

Almost nowhere on earth is recent forest denudation resulting in disasters comparable to those in the Himalayas, chiefly at 5,000 to 14,000 feet above sea level. Geologically relatively recent, the massive upthrust which created Mount Everest and other peaks, also shaped precipitous ridges where soil is held precariously by forest cover. In the now 75,956 villages spread across the 2,000-mile long Indian-Himalayan frontier, earning a livelihood is becoming increasingly hazardous. Overgrazing by sheep, goats and cattle speeds erosion when the snows melt. Construction of roads for defense purposes and to reach hallowed shrines, opens forests for logging in a wood-short land, and replaces "fear of the tiger with fear of landslides."

CHANDI PRASAD BHATT became increasingly aware of the threat of indiscriminate tree felling after July 20, 1970 when a cloudburst over his home district of Chamoli suddenly raised the water level of the Alaknanda River more than 60 feet. Some 400 square miles were flooded as roads and bridges washed away and Gauna Lake, formerly 330 feet deep, filled with debris. Also blocked were canals irrigating nearly one million acres in western Uttar Pradesh. Since then ever more houses, livestock and people have been lost to floods. In August 1978 the largest landslide of the century—over two miles long—blocked the Bhagirathi River. Reservoirs behind the great hydroelectric schemes that are the prime energy hope of the subcontinent, are rapidly silting up.

BHATT in 1964 had instituted the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (Society for Village Self-Rule) to organize fellow villagers in Gopeshwar for employment near their homes in forest-based industries—making wooden implements from ash trees and gathering and marketing herbs for aryuvedic medicine-and to combat vice and exploitation. Curtailment of the villagers' legitimate rights to trees and forest products in favor of outside commercial interests enabled BHATT in 1973 to mobilize the forest-wise society members and villagers into the collective Chipko Andolan (Hug the Trees Movement) to force revision of forest policies dating from 1917. Women, who regularly walk three to five miles to the forest to gather and carry home fuel and fodder on their backs, took the lead. True to the movement's non-violent philosophy, these women embraced the trees to restrict their felling. Establishment of "eco-development camps" brought villagers together to discuss their needs within the context of the ecological balance of the forest. Stabilizing slopes by building rock retaining walls, the campers planted trees started in their own village nurseries. While less than one-third of the trees set out by government foresters survived, up to 88 percent of the villager-planted trees grew.

BHATT and his society colleagues have been helped by sympathetic scientists, officials and college students. Yet theirs is essentially an indigenous movement of mountain villagers, and Chipko Andolan has become an instrument of action and education for members, officials and outsiders, in the realities of effective resource conservation.

Although BHATT has attended meetings in lowland India and abroad as a spokesman for Chipko, he has remained a man of his community. Now 48, he, his wife and five children continue to live the simple life of their Himalayan neighbors. In the process he has become knowledgeable and productive in helping ensure his peoples' hard won living.

In electing CHANDI PRASAD BHATT to receive the 1982 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes his inspiration and guidance of Chipko Andolan, a unique, predominantly women's environmental movement, to safeguard wise use of the forest.