The Appiko Movement is associated with which of the following Indian States ?
1. Uttarakhand
2. Uttar Pradesh
3. Kerala
4. Karnataka
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, only 4, Karnataka. The Appiko movement began in September 1983 in Uttara Kannada district, in the Western Ghats belt of Karnataka, and was led by the environmental activist Panduranga Hegde. Villagers put their arms around trees marked for felling so that contractors could not cut them, and the protest is credited with halting commercial tree-felling in that stretch of the Ghats. The name says where it comes from: 'appiko' is the Kannada word for hugging or embracing, chosen as the southern echo of 'chipko', the Hindi word for clinging, so the movement announced itself as Chipko translated into Kannada. That is the whole point of the question. Chipko belonged to the Garhwal Himalaya; Appiko belongs to the Karnataka Western Ghats. Only statement 4 names a State the movement is associated with, so the code gives (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the intended trap, and it is baited twice over, because Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh are the same place under two names. The Chipko movement — not Appiko — began at Mandal village on 24 April 1973 in the Garhwal Himalaya, with the celebrated Reni village action following in late March 1974; that territory was then part of Uttar Pradesh and became Uttarakhand only in 2000. A candidate who half-remembers 'tree-hugging movement' picks this pair and answers the wrong movement.  (b) Karnataka belongs in the answer but Kerala does not. Kerala's famous forest campaign of the same era was the Save Silent Valley movement, fought through the 1970s and early 1980s against a hydro-electric project in the Palakkad district rainforest — a separate movement, with a separate method, that ended in the declaration of Silent Valley National Park. Appiko has no Kerala chapter of origin.  (d) Uttarakhand alone is the answer to a different question — it is where Chipko began, in what was then Uttar Pradesh. Appiko was consciously named after Chipko and was inspired by it, but it happened a decade later and about two thousand kilometres to the south, in Karnataka's Uttara Kannada district.

Concept: Appiko is India's second great tree-hugging forest movement, and it is deliberately the child of the first. Chipko began in the Garhwal Himalaya in 1973, when villagers led by figures such as Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Sunderlal Bahuguna and Gaura Devi physically clung to trees to stop contractors felling them; the region was then part of Uttar Pradesh and is now Uttarakhand. Ten years later, in September 1983, Panduranga Hegde carried the same method into the Western Ghats of Uttara Kannada district in Karnataka, where commercial felling and the conversion of natural evergreen forest to plantations were destroying the livelihoods of forest-dependent villages. He called it Appiko, from the Kannada verb for embracing, so that the borrowed technique would carry a local name. The campaign is usually summarised in three Kannada words — ulisu, save the existing forest; belesu, grow more trees; and balasu, use forest produce rationally.

State PCS 2025 Q107 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q107 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer