Promoting Afforestation and Agroforestry: We are committed to achieving the target of a carbon sink by enhancing the tree cover.

The 2024 Sankalp Patra states this in one sentence under its own heading: "Promoting Afforestation and Agroforestry: We are committed to achieving the target of a carbon sink by enhancing the tree cover." The target it refers to is India's commitment under the Paris Agreement — an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030.

This promise runs to 2029, so nothing here is a verdict on whether it was kept. What can be checked now is the state of the instrument meant to keep it, because the CAG audited exactly that in the same month this fact-check is written.

The instrument is the Green India Mission — endorsed by the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change in 2011, approved as a centrally sponsored scheme in February 2014, and described by the audit as "the flagship afforestation programme of MoEF&CC". The audit, tabled on 12 August 2026, covers 2015-16 to 2024-25 across sixteen states and union territories.

Its central number: "As of March 2025, afforestation interventions were made only on 0.14793 million hectare of land during the period 2015-16 to 2024-25, against the approved target of 2.8 million hectare to be achieved by 2018 under GIM." Roughly five per cent of a target whose deadline passed seven years ago.

The reason the audit gives is structural, and it goes back to how the mission was designed. Of its ₹13,000 crore cost, "a total of ₹10,600 crore was to be sourced through convergence" — ₹6,000 crore from CAMPA, ₹4,000 crore from MGNREGS, ₹600 crore from the National Afforestation Programme. Fresh money was the remainder: "₹2,000 crore approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs from the 12th Plan outlay for the initial four years of the Scheme along with ₹400 crore from 13th Finance Commission grants towards states share". That convergence "could not be achieved and the proposed funding support could not be attained", so the mission ran on what the environment ministry could give it from its own budget: "Only ₹1,149.14 crore (47.88 per cent) had been provided during 10 years of implementation". A programme built on other people's money, which the other people never sent.

The governance meant to fix that did not sit. The National Governing Council and National Executive Council "were conducted less often than the prescribed frequency", and the revamped state and district bodies were either never constituted or not functioning — which the audit links directly to "faulty selection of sites".

Site selection matters because the mission's whole point was to green land nobody else would. It "emphasised greening of ecologically fragile and critical areas such as scrublands, ravines, wetlands and abandoned mines"; what actually happened was that "plantation activities were largely confined to low-vulnerability sites, while ecologically critical landscapes… were largely ignored". Most of the work fell under the sub-mission for improving existing forest quality, while the three sub-missions that would have added new tree cover — ecosystem restoration, urban and peri-urban trees, agro and social forestry — drew "limited attention and weak response".

The audit then did something worth noting on its own account. Rather than accept the states' reported figures, it went and looked: GPS readings at intervention sites, plantation boundaries viewed on Google Earth Pro, and temporal analysis commissioned from IISc Bangalore. That analysis "revealed little to no improvement in nearly 70 per cent of the locations assessed" — meaning a large share of what was reported as done shows no change on the ground.

Two forward-looking facts complete the picture. India's forest and tree cover did rise, from 24.62 per cent in ISFR 2021 to 25.17 per cent in ISFR 2023 — the audit records this, and records that the mission "could not deliver commensurate output", so the gain came from elsewhere. And the target has been rewritten: 25 million hectares by 2030, adopted in 2021 to match the Nationally Determined Contribution. As of September 2025, the ministry had not framed the implementation guidelines for it.

The promise is live and untested. Our verdict is lacks context, because the commitment is real and the programme that has to honour it has, on the audited record, delivered five per cent of a target that expired in 2018 and has no rulebook yet for the target that replaced it.