UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 107 of 150

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).

• (a)1 and 2 — 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)3 and 4 — 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)Only 1 — 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.

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-association questions on people's movements are pure map-plus-memory, and they are almost always set so that the most familiar movement supplies the wrong answer. Here the examiner has planted Chipko's geography in the option list twice, as Uttarakhand and as Uttar Pradesh, betting that a candidate will recognise 'tree-hugging' and reach for the Himalaya. Anchor each movement to one State and one decade instead: Chipko to the Garhwal Himalaya from 1973, Appiko to the Karnataka Western Ghats from 1983, Save Silent Valley to Kerala across the same years, Narmada Bachao Andolan to the Narmada valley of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat from the mid-1980s. Note also what the question does NOT ask: it does not ask who founded Appiko or what 'appiko' means, but those two facts — Panduranga Hegde, and the Kannada word for hugging — are the fastest route to the State, because the language of the name gives the region away.

• The Appiko movement began in September 1983 in Uttara Kannada district, in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, and was led by Panduranga Hegde
• 'Appiko' is the Kannada word for hugging or embracing — the local translation of 'chipko' — and villagers embraced trees to prevent them from being felled
• Appiko was directly inspired by Chipko and is credited with stopping tree-felling in that part of the Western Ghats
• Chipko itself began at Mandal village on 24 April 1973 in the Garhwal Himalaya, with the Reni village action in late March 1974; the area was then part of Uttar Pradesh and became Uttarakhand in 2000, which is why the question can list the same place as two different options
• Chipko's leading figures were Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Sunderlal Bahuguna and Gaura Devi
• Kerala's contemporaneous forest campaign was the Save Silent Valley movement, which ended with the Silent Valley rainforest in Palakkad district being protected as a national park

• Answering with Chipko's geography because both movements use the same tree-hugging method; Appiko is Karnataka, Chipko is the Garhwal Himalaya
• Not noticing that Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh in the option list are the same territory before and after 2000 — a paper that offers both is signalling that neither is the answer
• Placing Save Silent Valley in Karnataka; it was Kerala, in Palakkad district

UPPSC asks movements as a State or place association, or as a leader-to-movement match, usually inside a four-statement code; UPSC prefers to test the policy consequence instead — the Western Ghats expert committees, the Forest Rights Act, or the conservation status of a named landscape.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Chipko movement of 1973 originated in which district of the present-day State of Uttarakhand?

  • (a)Tehri Garhwal
  • (b)Chamoli
  • (c)Pithoragarh
  • (d)Uttarkashi

  Answer(b) Chamoli — the first confrontation was at Mandal village on 24 April 1973 and the best-known action, led by Gaura Devi, was at Reni village in late March 1974, both in Chamoli district of the Garhwal Himalaya, then part of Uttar Pradesh.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The word 'Appiko', which gives the Appiko movement its name, means which of the following in Kannada?

  • (a)To plant
  • (b)To embrace or hug
  • (c)To protest
  • (d)To protect

  Answer(b) To embrace or hug — it is the Kannada counterpart of the Hindi 'chipko', and villagers in Uttara Kannada embraced trees marked for felling from September 1983.