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introducing uttarakhand.org 4.0

Welcome to the latest version of the Uttarakhand Solidarity Network Web Portal. Owing to the pressing need of Uttarakhand’s many social and environmental movements to better coordinate their activities in face of the ever changing situation in the state, this latest edition of a fifteen-year effort merges the original Uttarakhand Home Page and Uttarakhand Solidarity Network website to renew their original mission to collate regularly updated news dispatches, calls to actions, commentaries, and letters from all over the web.

As an internet clearinghouse for various movements, the Uttarakhand Home Page was originally established in 1997 to lend support to the Uttarakhand Andolan. As the first site covering the Uttarakhand region, that multi-year project branched into many other areas, providing an exhaustive array of info pages describing various facets of Uttarakhand and its peoples, while endeavouring to chronicle the movement as it moved into its decisive phase. In addition to the website, the Prayaga Electronic Newsletter (1998-2000) and the Uttarakhand e-Group (1999-2008) likewise pioneered early uses of internet communications to facilitate the activities of the Uttarakhand Support Committee (1997-2002) and associated activists.

In 1999, with statehood looming, the first iteration of the uttarakhand.net was established, to give some theoretical grounding to the various social movements and link them thematically to those operating in India and beyond. Since 2000, it became abundantly clear that the new construct called “Uttaranchal” with its eternally provisional capital of Dehradun had fallen far short of the dreams and aspirations of the movement activists. While the state’s very name was finally restored in 2007, the current state of affairs has created new forces and empowered old foes that have afflicted the people of the region with massive corruption, rights violations, environmental destruction, and a widening gap between rich and poor — all the while driving more and more people out of the hills for good. Hence, as the Uttarakhand movement wound up and new issues came to the fore, the Uttarakhand Solidarity Network assumes its current avatar as a historic archive and repository to support others as they carry on the struggle.

Jai Uttarakhand!

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