On 14th August 2026, The Wire published an article titled ‘Green India Mission Falls Short of Its Target by 97.57%, CAG Report Flags Discrepancies, No Annual Accounts.’ The Wire’s framing invites its readers to conclude that India has accomplished almost nothing on afforestation over the past decade and that an entire country’s greening effort can be captured in a single scheme’s shortfall. That conclusion is contradicted by every major independent dataset available, from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to the UNFCCC.
The core problem with the Wire’s framing is a category error: it treats the Green India Mission (GIM) as though it were India’s sole afforestation programme. GIM is one of eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, and it operates alongside several other large-scale greening efforts: the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), the National Afforestation Programme, MGNREGS-linked plantation drives, the Nagar Van Yojana, the National Bamboo Mission, the Sub-Mission on Agroforestry, and dozens of state-level campaigns.
The FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025, released in Bali in October 2025, placed India ninth globally in total forest area, up from tenth in the previous assessment, with approximately 72.74 million hectares of forest. More importantly, India retained its third-place ranking worldwide in annual net forest area gain, adding roughly 191,000 hectares per year between 2015 and 2025, behind only China and the Russian Federation. The India State of Forest Report 2023 (ISFR), released in December 2024 by the Forest Survey of India, confirmed that total forest and tree cover stood at 827,357 square kilometres, 25.17 percent of the country’s geographical area, representing a net increase of 1,445 square kilometres over the 2021 assessment. Of this, forest cover grew by 156 square kilometres and tree cover expanded by 1,289 square kilometres.
On the climate front, arguably the metric that matters most for a mission conceived under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) is carbon sequestration. Between 2005 and 2021, India created an additional carbon sink of 2.29 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent through forest and tree cover, against a Paris Agreement NDC target of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes by 2030. In March 2026, the Cabinet approved an even more ambitious NDC for 2031–35, raising the carbon sink target to 3.5 to 4 billion tonnes by 2035.
The CAG report’s substantive findings are, in fact, well-known and largely self-correcting. It flagged poor planning, weak Centre-state coordination, chronic underfunding, and the absence of annual accounts in eight states. These are implementation pathologies common to virtually every centrally-sponsored scheme that depends on state-level execution. This is precisely why the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change released a revised Green India Mission document in June 2025, over a year before the CAG report was tabled. The revised roadmap explicitly addresses the silos the CAG identified: it integrates GIM with the National Afforestation Programme, aligns implementation with CAMPA and MGNREGS, adopts a micro-ecosystem approach targeting ecologically fragile landscapes (Aravalli, Western Ghats, Himalayan region, mangroves), and prioritises native species over monoculture plantations. In other words, the government had already course-corrected on the very deficiencies the CAG audit subsequently flagged.
Between 2019-20 and 2023-24, the National CAMPA Authority approved ₹38,516 crore for state annual plans. States released ₹29,311 crore to their forest departments, of which ₹26,001 crore was utilised. Against a target of 209,297 hectares of compensatory afforestation, 178,261 hectares were raised, hitting an 85 percent achievement rate. Gujarat, Chandigarh, Mizoram, and Madhya Pradesh hit 100 percent of their targets. This is a single parallel mechanism, operating at a budget scale roughly twenty-five times what GIM received. To ignore it while headlining GIM’s shortfall is editorial malpractice.
The Wire’s headline and the editorial reflex to treat a 97.57 percent shortfall in one scheme as a verdict on India’s entire environmental policy is analytically irresponsible. India is the third-largest contributor to global annual forest gain. It has already achieved roughly 76 percent of its Paris Agreement carbon sink target for 2030 with four years still to run. Its total forest and tree cover has expanded in every biennial assessment since the ISFR series began.
A responsible reading of the CAG report would have done three things. First, it would have situated GIM within the broader ecosystem of afforestation programmes rather than treating it as the whole. Second, it would have distinguished between process failures (poor accounting, low fund utilisation) and outcome failures (net forest cover), which tell very different stories. Third, it would have noted that the government’s revised GIM roadmap, issued over a year before the audit was tabled, already addresses the report’s principal recommendations. The Wire did none of these. Instead, it produced a number designed to generate outrage, and outrage, as a general rule, is the enemy of understanding.
The article is written by Sonal Upadhyay.
