Losing forest for trees: On the CAG’s audit of the Green India Mission

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.