Uttarakhand has had a long involvement with forest protests, whose latest incarnation was Chipko. Villagers have been reacting primarily to policies of the State, either the hill durbar, the Lucknow authorities, or the government in New Delhi. The following description of forest policies in Kumaun and Garhwal is culled from social historian Ramchandra Guha's book Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Oxford. University Press, 1989).
To accommodate the demand for strong timber with which to build the Indian railway network, in 1864, the colonial Government set up a Forest Department. In its wake came the Forest Act of 1865, which asserted the State's monopoly over forests. A comprehensive all-India act was drafted 13 years later, under which forests were divided into two categories: Reserved, to enable timber production, and Protected, where the villagers could exercise their haque-haquooks.
Tehri Garhwal: Commercial exploitation of the forests in Tehri Garhwal started in the 1850s, when an Englishman got a lease for IRs 400 per annum and began felling deodar trees and floating them downriver. Fifteen years later, the North Western Provinces government negotiated a lease of all the forests for IRs 10,000 per annum. According to an 1888 report, from 1869 to 1885, the Yamuna woods exported 6.5 million railway sleepers. As the State exploited the woodlands for commerce, the villagers' access to the forest declined.
The leased forests reverted back to the control of the Tehri Durbar in 1925. During the first three years of World War II, over 1.5 million cubic feet of timber was exported for use in the front (over 20,000 trees were exported annually from the Tons Valley alone) and over time forests became the largest (single) item of revenue for the Durbar. Extensive rules were made, wherein the villagers had to ask for permission even to pluck oak leaves.