Losing forest for trees: On the CAG’s audit of the Green India Mission
A CAG audit reveals that the Green India Mission has significantly underperformed, failing to meet its forest cover and quality targets over the last decade. The report highlights a shift toward simple tree plantation drives that lack the ecological depth of true forest restoration.
Why it matters
The failure of this mission undermines India's climate commitments under the Paris Agreement and highlights a critical gap between government tree-planting statistics and actual forest health.
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.
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