📍 98% Shortfall in Green Mission & Deforestation Amid Climate Change!

📍 98% Shortfall in Green Mission & Deforestation Amid Climate Change!

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India told Parliament in August 2026 that the government has failed to meet its targets to increase and improve forest cover in India, by nearly 98 per cent. 

South Asia is one of the regions most vulnerable to the global climate crisis. The World Bank’s South Asia Climate Change Roadmap warns that annual economic losses could hit $160 billion by 2030 in the region, heavily impacting poor families and worsening food insecurity. The Bank also estimates that over the past two decades more than 750 million people in South Asia have been affected by at least one climate-related disaster.

For a region so vulnerable to climate change, forests, a crucial asset for any nation, should be at the centre of our adaptation strategies. They hold water, protect soil, moderate temperatures, store carbon and provide suitable habitats for an extraordinary range of plants animals, microbes. For millions of people, particularly forest-dependent communities, they are also a source of food, fuel, medicine and livelihoods. So, the obvious policy response should be to protect existing forests and increase green cover.

Recognising the climate catastrophe staring at us, The Government of India formulated the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) 18 years ago in 2008. Of the eight missions flagged for urgent action to cope with climate change, an important one was the Green India Mission (GIM). The focus of the GIM is on restoring, enhancing and protecting, the country’s diminishing forest and tree cover. Three specific targets were laid down: Increase forest and tree cover on five million hectares; Improve the quality of the forest and its species diversity on another five million hectares and Support and Supplement the forest-based livelihoods of the roughly three million households of forest dwelling communities. 

We are failing on all fronts of the Green India Mission. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s performance audit of the Green India Mission, tabled in Parliament in August 2026, shows just how large the gap is between stated goals and what has been achieved. The GIM had set a target of increasing forest cover by 1.4 million hectares between 2015-16 and 2024-25. The actual increase was only about 0.03 million hectares, a 97.57% shortfall. This embarrassing figure reveals the absolute and total failure on the part of those whose job it was to use the allotted funds to meet the targets of the National Mission to increase forest cover. The story is similar when it comes to improving the quality of existing forests. The CAG found a shortfall of nearly 92%. This is not just inefficiency; it is a catastrophic inability to recognise the gravity of the climate crisis and its consequences.

Why did this happen? The CAG audit is scathing, pointing to the i) Failure to use available funds with states utilising just half of the money available; ii) Lack of convergence between programs and deficient monitoring leading to structural gaps; iii) Failure to secure the massive fund proposed for the second phase and inappropriate selection of landscapes for afforestation. 

In this backdrop, the scale of government sanctioned deforestation, the cutting down of large tracts of forest for so called ‘development’ is baffling. Government data shows that between April 2023, and March 2026, 71,023.30 hectares of forest land was approved for diversion to non-forestry purposes across India. Madhya Pradesh accounted for 19,432 hectares, Odisha 8,966 hectares, Arunachal Pradesh 7,335 hectares, Jharkhand 5,410 hectares and Chhattisgarh 4,219 hectares. 

Mining and stone quarrying accounted for the largest share of 16,463 hectares. Hydroelectric and irrigation projects accounted for another 14,294 hectares, while roads accounted for 12,715 hectares. These are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. Every hectare represents a piece of an ecosystem, and often a landscape that has taken decades, sometimes centuries, to evolve. 

Look at Hasdeo in Chhattisgarh. The Hasdeo-Arand forest in North Chhattisgarh is one of the most important forest patches of Central India, popularly referred to as the lungs of Central India. The Adani Parsa East and Kente Basan (PEKB) coal mine is located in this biodiversity-rich region. Approximately 4.48 lakh trees are slated to be cut down in phases. Around 1,013 hectares of closed canopy forest has already been cleared and the government has also given in-principle clearance for the felling of trees in 1,742.6 hectares for the Kente Extension coal block. 

In the misguided project to link the Ken and Betwa rivers in Madhya Pradesh, 9,000 hectares including 5,761 hectares of forest land will be submerged. This will involve killing approximately 215,875 trees. Not just that, the project will also claim over 4,000 hectares of the densely forested Panna Tiger Reserve and 1,314 hectares of its buffer zone. The highway widening construction activity linking the Char Dhams of Uttarakhand (Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri) has already claimed nearly 60,000 trees. 

These are just some examples. Looming in the future is the mega project to destroy the biosphere of the environmentally unique and fragile Great Nicobar island. A commercial hub including an airport, an international transshipment terminal, a township and associated infrastructure is to be built for which rainforests will be slashed and biodiversity rich indigenous lands will be appropriated. According to government records, approval has already been given for the diversion of 130.75 sq km of forest land. 

The CAG’s findings on the Green India Mission should not be seen merely as another story of a failed government programme. The larger question is about the coherence of our environment policy. On one side, we recognise forests as critical to climate resilience. On the other, we continue to divert existing forests for mining, infrastructure and so-called development projects. Both development and environmental protection are necessary. But development cannot mean treating natural forests as expendable, interchangeable pieces of land. The real test of India's climate policy will not be the number of saplings planted for a photograph. It will be whether the mature forests that have survived for generations are still standing when the next heatwave, drought, flood or extreme rainfall arrives.

this article appeared in The Asian Age on 03 Oct 26 : https://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/suman-sahai98-shortfall-in-green-mission-deforestation-amid-climate-change-1992851

⌲ Look at South Korea!

As we ponder over our abysmal failure to either increase or improve our forest cover, let us look at what South Korea has done to restore and build its forests. Remember the Comptroller and Auditor General of India told Parliament in August 2026 that the Government had failed to meet its targets to increase and improve forest cover in India, by nearly 98%. A 98 percent deficit? spoken plainly, zilch had been done. 

Now to Korea. During the 35 years of Japanese rule in Korea the country’s forests suffered severe and deliberate destruction due to aggressive commercial logging and extraction of timber for use by Japan during the two world wars. Worse was to follow when what forests were left were to face the depredations of the Korean War. By the end of the wars, almost 80 percent of Korea's forests were destroyed or severely degraded. 

To the credit of the war ravaged South Korean government, it made forest recovery a national imperative, initiating a centrally coordinated afforestation campaign in 1973. Through large-scale planting, public engagement, and intensive post-planting care, forest cover and quality steadily improved. By 2020, the overall volume of all living trees in South Korea’s forests had increased nearly 30 times from its degraded state. That is a stupendous achievement! 

South Korea borrowed an implementation-management strategy from industry used for problem solving and continuous improvement. It involves four iterative stages, Codified as PDCA: Plan → Do → Check → Act

1. Strategic planning (Plan)

2. Implementation (Do)

3. Performance evaluation (Check), and 

4. Corrective action (Act)

It was used successfully in reforesting South Korea. It’s a template anyone can use. Is the IndianGovernment listening?

📍Ken-Betwa Link: Development or more mindless discrimination?

Linking the Ken and Betwa rivers has become an issue once again. Members of the communities living along these rivers are protesting this in novel ways, lying on simulated funeral pyres in the river waters, starting hunger strikes in a submerged state, or standing in the river with nooses around their necks. “We’ll turn into Durga and Kali,” say the women protesting in chest-deep water. The images are powerful, disturbing, they tell you how much this move has upset those who live along the river and venerate it.

I have travelled through this landscape a few times over the years. In Panna the Ken river flows with a rare serenity, almost stillness. The forests are alive with biodiversity, the terrain rugged yet beautiful, and the river sustains not only wildlife but entire communities of farmers, fishers, forest dwellers and pastoral families. To stand on the banks of the Ken is to understand that rivers are not merely channels of water to be engineered on drawing boards. They are living ecological systems. Which is why the Ken-Betwa river-linking project is deeply troubling.

The project is being promoted as a solution to Bundelkhand’s water crisis, with promises of irrigation and drinking water for drought-prone districts. But beneath the language of development lies a familiar and disturbing reality: Forests will be destroyed, the ecology dented. Thousands of people will lose their homes and ancestral lands, and they will lose their livelihoods. India’s track record on rehabilitating persons displaced by dams and development projects is very poor, in fact rehabilitation in India has rarely been just or complete. Rather than equitable development, this project too, like earlier dam projects, will help some and discriminate against many others.

Independent estimates suggest that more than 22 villages would be displaced, affecting over 7,000 families in Panna and Chattarpur districts, and of these, 20 villages would be completely submerged by the Ken-Betwa project, many of them Adivasi communities dependent on forests and river ecosystems for survival. The Daudhan dam, the cornerstone of the ₹45,000 cr Ken-Betwa Link Project (KBLP), alone will submerge large areas, including parts of the Panna Tiger Reserve. The irony is painful: a project meant to solve distress in one region will create another geography of suffering elsewhere.

This is a familiar playbook and India has seen it before. When the Bhakra-Nangal dam was built after Independence, it was hailed as one of the “temples of modern India”. It is located on the Sutlej along Bilaspur in Himachal Pradesh and Rupnagar in Punjab. Yet behind that grand national narrative lay the 371 submerged villages which took away everything from some 36,000 families — their homes, assets and livelihoods.

Families were promised cultivable land, rehabilitation and a better future. Decades later, many oustees were still fighting legal battles for proper compensation and land rights. Reports have documented how displaced families were pushed onto barren or disputed lands, while many landless workers and labourers were excluded entirely from compensation because they did not possess formal land titles. This pattern repeated itself across India. 

The Hirakud dam in Odisha displaced more than one lakh people and submerged over 300 villages. Many never received proper rehabilitation.

The Pong dam displaced more than 30,000 families from Himachal Pradesh, many of whom were relocated to Rajasthan with promises of fertile agricultural land. Several families reportedly received arid land without irrigation or clear ownership rights. Some are still fighting for justice after half a century.

The Narmada Valley Development Project, which includes large structures like the Sardar Sarovar Dam and other dams on the Narmada river, led to massive displacement. Over two lakh rural and tribal people lost their homes and lands to reservoir submergence without fair compensation. The Narmada project also caused severe environmental damage, like submergence of dense forests, destruction of local wildlife habitats and obstructed the migration paths for fish. Official statements usually assert that rehabilitation has been completed, but independent investigations document missing land allotments, fake registries, uncultivable plots on a large scale and thousands of excluded families. Even today, many displaced families continue to seek their just dues and compensation. This is the history of “development” and discrimination in India.

Such discrimination results in livelihood collapse. The forest gatherer loses access to forest produce. The fisher loses the river. Tenant farmers, artisans, cattle grazers, boatmen and agricultural labourers disappear from official compensation records because they do not exist in government records. This is why people in the Ken-Betwa region are anxious. They know of the government’s track record on rehabilitation.

Equally worrying is the ecological blindness underlying the river-linking approach itself. Experts have warned repeatedly that the hydro-dynamics of Indian river systems are still inadequately understood. Climate change has already altered rainfall behaviour across India. Rivers that appear “surplus” today may not remain so tomorrow. Yet massive irreversible interventions are being pursued with astonishing confidence.

Bundelkhand’s water crisis is real. But it cannot be solved through ecologically disruptive mega-projects. Destroying the environment and upsetting the natural balance can never provide sustainable solutions, which is what we should be seeking, not shortcuts that have failed time and again. Rivers are not pipelines. Their flow patterns, seasonal rhythms, sediment loads, groundwater recharge functions and biodiversity relationships are deeply interconnected.

Dry regions in India built sustainable systems to ensure water access using decentralised water systems — tanks, ponds, watershed structures, forest protection and groundwater recharge practices adapted to local ecology. Instead of strengthening such systems and improving them, we choose to chase gigantic engineering solutions because they appear politically dramatic. The tragedy is that in such projects, the benefits and burdens are rarely borne by the same people. Water and electricity flow somewhere else, to urban centres and commercial agriculture. But the people who surrender their forests, villages and ancestral lands are often left with nothing more than broken promises.

This appeared in The Asian Age: https://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/suman-sahai-ken-betwa-link-development-or-more-mindless-discrimination-1981618

📍Destroying Uttarakhand

Many years ago when I went to school in Nainital, it was a place of thrilling natural beauty. Uttarakhand then a part of Uttar Pradesh, (UP) was lush and green wherever you looked. Every place seemed like a picnic spot.

In 2000, the new state of Uttarakhand was created, hiving off the hilly areas of UP and some parts of the terai. Then “development” began in right ernest , turning this haven into a concrete jungle. A study conducted by the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) using satellite imagery, climate data, and GIS analysis shows that snow cover decreased by over 1640 sq km from 1992 to 2022. In the same period concrete construction increased 13 times from 40.66 sq km in 1992 to 526.35 sq km in 2022.

Uttarakhand is being slowly buried under concrete. Gone is the haven with lush green forests full of wonderful plants, birds and animals. In its place is emerging an ugly built up blot on the Himalayas. Not only is the state turning ugly, it is also turning dangerous. Roads are being cut into hillsides without any planning, opening them up to landslides which have increased several fold. Forests are being slaughtered, driving wild life away and altering the ecosystem for the worse. Forests regulated water flow, when they are cut flooding increases. 

The perverse tragedy is that the development that is needed, is not reaching the villages where good schools, health care, basic services and livelihood opportunities are desperately required. All the development is devoted to urban areas converting them into monstrous concrete jungles. You just have to visit the famed hill stations of yesterday - Nainital, Dehradun and Mussoorie to see what hideous urban sprawls they have become. 

This kind of “development” that our so called ‘vikas’ oriented government boasts about, is actually raising vulnerability, for people in the mountains, as well as for people living downstream. The Himalayas are a living, fragile ecosystem with tenuous limits. It is extremely foolish and highly dangerous to think you can continue treating mountains like construction sites. Nature will have the final say and the consequences will be extremely unpleasant, as we have already begun to see with increasing incidences of manmade calamities.

📍Who is saving and who is destroying the forest ?

A recent report has just told us that India can save its forests by winning the war on poverty. Indicating thereby that the poor exploit the forest recklessly to fulfil their needs. But is this really true? How come there are dense jungles where the Adivasi communities, hardly ranked as the “richest” on the economic scale, have been living for generations? And how is it that forests or even orchards near cities are hacked and cleared for projects like luxury housing or amusement parks?
 
Forest dwellers usually secure their livelihoods in sustainable ways and they treat their forests as their strongest allies, not their enemies. The concept of Sacred Groves in the North East shows us how these communities venerate their forests and trees. The Sarna of the Chotanagpur adivasis are groves of old Sal trees which are sacred to them, where they believe their village deities and spirits reside. Sacred Groves and Sarnas are inviolate. The forests are protected.
 
On the other hand, the township of Gurgaon (now Gurugram), part of the National Capital Region has been built on orchards, fields and pastures. No, it is not the poor who ravage the forests, it is the rich with their bottomless greed.
 
We are seeing how the lush, biodiversity rich Hasdeo forest is being butchered, heartless brutes treading over the weeping women holding on to the feet of the monsters who are vandalising their trees, their deities and gods, the spirits of their ancestors. The communities of Hasdeo are not destroying their forest, Adani and his henchmen are doing that.
 
So please stop the hypocrisy about winning the war on poverty to save forests. Stop spinning yarns about income generation activities that will be mired in corruption and never materialise. Instead, restrain the unbridled avarice of the super-rich honchos…and the forests will be saved.

The News - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/not-binary-india-can-save-its-forests-by-winning-the-war-on-poverty/article71100846.ece