A recent report from the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) reveals that forest cover increased by just 0.03 million hectares between 2015-16 and 2024-25. This is significantly below the target of 1.4 million hectares set under the Green India Mission, resulting in a shortfall of 97.57%. The findings raise concerns about the effectiveness of the initiative aimed at enhancing India’s forest resources.
The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report, tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, also revealed that against the target of 1.4 million hectares, improvement of forest cover quality was observed in only 0.11 million hectares (91.87 per cent shortfall) during the same period. The findings emerged after examining the Green India Mission (GIM) interventions in 16 states and Union territories for which the Environment Ministry had approved physical and financial targets over the last 10 years. It said that there was also a lack of monitoring of the interventions made, with 14 states failing to provide required public web-links for transparency.
“The absence of convergence, central to the implementation strategy of the GIM, was evident across all institutional levels,” said the report. “Audit evaluations revealed inflated data, overstated achievements due to non-validated KML files and GIS analysis showing that 70 per cent of sampled sites had no noticeable changes attributable to GIM,” said the report.
