Losing forest for trees: On the CAG’s audit of the Green India Mission.
India is counting trees when it should be restoring forests.
A performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of the Green India Mission (GIM) has found that a scheme conceived to heal India’s forests had, across a decade, achieved almost nothing it set out to do. Instead of improving forest quality over 1.4 million hectares, the mission only managed 0.11 million — not even a tenth of the target. On expanding forest cover, the mission barely scraped together four per cent. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) channels money collected from industry for diverting forest land into afforestation, while the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, now rebranded as VB-G RAM G funds rural wage labour that can be used for plantation and land-restoration works, but GIM’s intended convergence with these schemes never materialised. The mission was one of the eight pillars of the National Action Plan on Climate Change, unveiled in 2008, and the instrument through which India promised the Paris Agreement an additional carbon sink of 2.5 billion to 3 billion tonnes by 2030. Its animating idea was ecological — biodiversity, water, sequestration, and the revival of habitat. GIM however seems to be on the back burner and, for all practical purposes, replaced by a tree plantation drive called ‘Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam (A Tree in the Name of Mother)’. Launched in 2024, the government reports planting 140 crore saplings so far, but the latest forest data expose the gulf between a tree and a forest. The India State of Forest Report 2023 records a gain of 1,445 square kilometres in green cover but only 156 sq km of it is true forest. The rest, 1,289 sq km, is ‘tree cover outside recorded forests.’ Within the recorded forests, dense canopy is thinning into scrub. Ergo, India is planting more and foresting less.
Few examples encapsulate this as much as the controversy over the Aravallis. Arguably the country’s most degraded range — its hillocks quarried away, its native growth overrun by the invasive ‘vilayati kikar’ (Prosopis juliflora) — it is now to be rescued by a ‘Green Wall’ of fresh planting. But these arboreal conscripts cannot undo the damage from years of mining, halt encroachment, or summon back an ecosystem that took millennia to form. Restoration is not landscaping. The CAG’s instrument is accountancy: it can count hectares and rupees, not the worth of a living forest; and its assessment cannot always capture the practical challenges of implementing missions. However, its verdict still lands. A mission to restore India’s forests has been allowed to wither while the state busies itself counting trees.