From Our Correspondent
New Delhi: India’s flagship Green India Mission has spectacularly missed its forest cover targets, achieving barely 2% of the planned expansion over a full decade, the Comptroller and Auditor General has revealed in a damning performance audit tabled in Parliament.
Against a target of 1.4 million hectares of additional forest cover between 2015-16 and 2024-25, the actual increase stood at a meagre 0.034 million hectares — a shortfall of 97.57%. Improvement in forest quality fared only marginally better, with just 0.114 million hectares achieved against the same 1.4 million hectare target, a shortfall of 91.87%.
The audit examined the planning, implementation and monitoring of the mission in 16 states and Union Territories for which the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had approved physical and financial targets during the period.
Launched under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, the Green India Mission was meant to expand and improve forest and tree cover, enhance ecosystem services and support forest-dependent livelihoods. While the broader vision spoke of five million hectares each for expansion and quality improvement, the CAG focused on the concrete targets approved for the 16 states and UTs under review.
Wrong priorities, weak planning
Despite climate vulnerability being a key criterion for selecting landscapes, authorities repeatedly chose low-to-moderate priority areas over more vulnerable ones. Planning was equally deficient. Of 68 sampled Annual Plans of Operation, only six reached the ministry before the start of the financial year, and none was approved on time.
Funding gaps and failed convergence with CAMPA
Financial support remained chronically inadequate. Against an approved outlay of ₹2,000 crore from the 12th Plan for the initial years, plus ₹400 crore from 13th Finance Commission grants, only ₹1,149.14 crore — just 47.88% — was received as budgetary support over the decade.
A central pillar of the mission was convergence with other schemes, particularly the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), along with MGNREGS, Nagar Van Yojana and School Nursery Yojana. In practice, these operated largely in isolation. The absence of meaningful coordination prevented the mobilisation of the proposed additional ₹10,600 crore in funding support.
The failure to converge with CAMPA is particularly significant given the long-standing problems of underutilisation and governance in compensatory afforestation funds. National-level data shows that only about 67.5% of the approved CAMPA outlay was utilised between 2019-20 and 2023-24. As of 31 March 2025, more than ₹12,500 crore of CAMPA funds remained unutilised. At the end of 2024-25, over ₹10,380 crore collected for compensatory afforestation was still pending disbursement to states and Union Territories.
State-level audits have repeatedly flagged diversion of CAMPA money for inadmissible purposes, delays in execution leading to cost escalations, and weak monitoring of plantation outcomes. These systemic weaknesses in the compensatory mechanism meant that one of the principal sources of potential support for the Green India Mission remained under-leveraged and poorly aligned with its objectives.
Inflated claims and weak oversight
Monitoring and transparency failures further undermined credibility. Fourteen states failed to provide the required public web links. Audit evaluations found inflated data and overstated achievements, often linked to non-validated KML files. GIS analysis of sampled sites showed that 70% registered no noticeable changes attributable to the mission.
Eight states and Union Territories either did not maintain annual accounts or produced accounts that remained unaudited or showed discrepancies. Only Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh conducted any assessment of carbon sequestration between 2015 and 2025.
A decade of under-deliveryThe CAG findings present a picture of a flagship programme that has fallen far short of even its scaled-down targets. After ten years, measurable gains in forest cover and quality remain negligible. The report also highlights how the lack of convergence with underperforming mechanisms such as CAMPA compounded the problem, leaving both the mission and the broader compensatory afforestation system struggling to deliver on their core environmental objectives.