Gaura Devi

Gaura Devi was born in Lata, a village high in the Garhwal Himalaya, and married at twelve into the neighbouring village of Reni, where the forests above the fields supplied firewood, fodder and protection against landslides. She was widowed at 22 and brought up her son alone, working the land. By the early 1970s she was head of the village women's group, the Mahila Mangal Dal.

The hill villages had already begun resisting the auction of their forests to outside contractors under the name Chipko, from the Hindi for embrace, after villagers at Mandal in 1973 vowed to hug the trees rather than let them be cut. In 1974 the state forest department sold more than two thousand trees above Reni to a sporting goods company. On 26 March the men of the village were called down to the district town, supposedly to receive long-delayed compensation for land taken by the army, and a lorry of labourers with axes drove up the valley the same day.

A girl saw them and ran to Gaura Devi. She gathered 27 women and walked up to the felling site, where she told the men that the forest was their mother's home and that they would have to cut the women down first. One labourer was drunk and waved a gun. The women did not move, and stayed through the night. In the morning the labourers went away.

The state government appointed a committee, which found in the villagers' favour, and felling in the Reni forest was banned for ten years. She died in 1991.