Green India Mission Falls Short of its Target by 97.57%, CAG Report Flags Discrepancies, No Annual Accounts

New Delhi: The Green India Mission has fallen short of its target by 97.57%, and has managed to increase forest cover across just 0.03409 million hectares as against its target of 1.4 million hectares, the the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) highlighted in a report tabled in Parliament on Thursday (August 13), reported New Indian Express.

The report found that the main reasons for the afforestation programme to have fallen short of its targets over the past decade include poor planning, weak coordination and chronic underfunding.

The CAG examined the Green India Mission across 16 states and Union Territories from 2015-16 to 2024-25 for its report. The Green India Mission scheme is run by the Environment Ministry and has the objective of  expanding forest and tree cover, improving ecosystem services and boosting forest based livelihoods.

The report added that the programme was affected by a lack of coordination with other afforestation initiatives such as CAMPA and the rural jobs guarantee programme MGNREGS along with schemes including Nagar Van Yojana and School Nursery Yojana, which operated in isolation.

While a bottom up approach in selecting project areas was not followed, landscapes which had low to moderate climate vulnerability were at times chosen over more vulnerable areas.

The auditor has also flagged budgetary concerns as one of the reasons for the poor performance. As against an outlay of Rs 2,000 crore approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs from the 12th Plan for the initial four years of the scheme, along with Rs 400 crore from 13th Finance Commission grants towards the states' share, only Rs 1,149.14 crore (47.88 per cent) was received as budgetary support during the 10 years of implementation from 2015-16 to 2024-25, the CAG found, reported New Indian Express.

The report found that eight states and Union Territories did not maintain annual accounts, and in some places, accounts were prepared but they often remained unaudited or showed discrepancies against subsidiary records.

The CAG report also highlighted the fact that no state, except Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, conducted any assessment of carbon sequestration during 2015-2025.

Audit evaluations also revealed inflated data and overstated achievements due to non-validated KML files, while GIS analysis showed that 70% of sampled sites had no noticeable changes attributable to the Green India Mission.

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