That Comptroller and Auditor General’s performance audit of the Green India Mission is very troubling. India does not lack ambition on paper. There are schemes, targets, budgets and repeated commitments to use forests as a bulwark against climate change. What is in short supply, the CAG audit suggests, is delivery. Between 2015-16 and 2024-25, the Mission aimed to increase forest and tree cover over 1.4 million hectares.

The actual increase was only about 30,000 hectares ~ a shortfall of approximately 97.57 per cent. The record on improving degraded forests is scarcely better. Against a target of 1.4 million hectares, improvement was achieved over only around 110,000 hectares. The CAG points to inadequate planning, weak financial management, insufficient monitoring and poor coordination among government agencies. But the audit also exposes a deeper problem: the tendency to confuse planting trees with creating forests. A forest cannot be produced by treating afforestation as an administrative exercise in planting a prescribed number of saplings. It takes time and ecological knowledge.

It requires suitable land, appropriate species, long-term maintenance, careful management of soil and water, participation by local communities and sustained monitoring. The crucial question is not how many saplings were planted, but what became of them. How many survived? What is their condition after five years? Have they become part of a functioning ecosystem? Has vegetation reduced soil erosion and improved water retention? Has biodiversity recovered? Without such measures, impressive plantation figures can conceal ecological failure. This is also why the language of “green cover” can mislead.

A landscape filled with trees is not necessarily a forest. Rows of commercially planted trees may increase vegetation without recreating the ecological complexity of an existing forest. A forest is a living system ~ of trees, soil, fungi, insects, birds, animals, water and innumerable relationships that evolve over decades, often centuries. The choice of species is therefore critical. The CAG audit drew attention to plantations involving Acacia auriculiformis, a species identified in the audit as invasive. If afforestation introduces species........

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