 In 1960, he left his job at GMOU, to commit full-time to his Sarvodaya activities, and by 1964, Bhatt had instituted the "Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal" (Society for Village Self-Rule) to organise fellow villagers in Gopeshwar for employment near their homes in forest-based industries, making wooden implements from ash trees and gathering and marketing herbs for ayurvedic medicine-and to combat vice and exploitation.Curtailment of the villagers' legitimate rights to trees and forest products in favour of outside commercial interests enabled Bhatt, in 1973, to mobilise the forest-wise society members and villagers into the collective Chipko Andolan (Hug the Trees Movement) to force revision of forest policies dating from 1917.Women, who regularly walk three to five miles to the forest to gather and carry home fuel and fodder on their backs, took the lead.