India Promised to Improve the Quality of 1.4 Million Hectares of Forest. A Government Auditor Just Found It Managed About 0.11 Million. That Is a 91.87% Shortfall.
By Squirrels·
The trees were counted. The forest was not there.
India's national auditor has delivered one of the bluntest verdicts yet on a flagship green programme. In a performance audit tabled in Parliament, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) found that the Green India Mission — the country's headline forestry and climate scheme — fell short of its core forest-quality target by 91.87%.
Against a goal of improving forest quality across 1.4 million hectares, improvement was actually recorded on roughly 0.11384 million hectares.
That is not a rounding error. That is a programme that did a fraction of what it set out to do.
What the Green India Mission was supposed to be
Launched as one of the missions under India's national climate action plan, the Green India Mission was meant to do more than plant saplings for a photograph. Its stated aims were to improve the quality of degraded forest cover and to restore ecosystem services across large tracts of land.
The audit examined implementation across 16 states and Union Territories over the decade from 2015-16 to 2024-25.
The second, larger number
The quality shortfall was not the worst finding. On the objective of improving ecosystem services and restoration across 1.4 million hectares, the CAG's own site inspections found a shortfall of 97.57%.
In other words, when auditors physically went to look, they found even less than the paperwork implied.
Why the audit reads like an indictment of the paperwork itself
The most damaging passages are not about missed targets. They are about the data used to claim success.
The CAG flagged states reporting inconsistencies in their own records. Among the problems: misreporting the height of saplings and inflating the area shown as planted.
Targets set without reliable baseline data on existing forest quality
Site-level reality diverging sharply from state-reported figures
Gaps in monitoring that let discrepancies go unchecked for years
When a programme's own numbers cannot be trusted, the shortfall is only half the story. The other half is that no one could reliably say how big the shortfall was until an outside auditor measured it.
Why it matters beyond one scheme
India has made forest and tree cover central to its international climate commitments — the pledge to build an additional carbon sink through more green cover. A mission that under-delivers by this margin, on the very metric of forest quality, cuts directly into the credibility of those numbers.
There is also a domestic-governance point. Afforestation money is real money, disbursed to states and agencies. An audit that finds inflated plantation areas and mis-stated sapling data raises the uncomfortable question of what, exactly, the spending bought.
What happens next
Audit reports of this kind are typically referred onward for parliamentary scrutiny, where ministries are asked to explain the gaps and lay out corrective action. The Environment Ministry will be expected to respond to both the quality shortfall and the data-integrity findings.
The deeper fix is harder than any single reply. It means building baselines you can measure against, monitoring that catches inflated claims early, and targets that reflect what degraded land can realistically absorb.
The trees, in many places, were counted. The audit's real finding is that counting was never the same thing as growing a forest.