The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has flagged major shortcomings in the implementation of the Green India Mission (GIM), including inadequate funding, weak coordination between government schemes, poor monitoring and failure to meet key targets for improving forest cover and its quality.
The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change launched the GIM in 2014 with the aim of protecting, restoring, and enhancing the country’s forest cover. The CAG’s audit examined the planning, implementation and monitoring of GIM interventions in 16 States and Union Territories between 2015-16 and 2024-25. Similarly, an increase in forest cover was recorded over only 0.03409 million hectares against a target of 1.4 million hectares, representing a 97.57% shortfall.
While the target was to improve the quality of forest cover over 1.4 million hectares, improvement was observed only in 0.11384 million hectares — a “shortfall of 91.87%”, according to the audit report.
The government’s long-term low-carbon strategy identifies the GIM as one of the key programmes supporting this target. It was never meant to be another greenwashing exercise, but a genuine effort towards sustainable environmental change,” Mr. India has committed to creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5-3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030 through additional forest and tree cover. The audit noted that the mission failed to secure ₹10,600 crore in proposed funding support. Against ₹2,000 crore approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs for the initial four years of the scheme, along with ₹400 crore from 13th Finance Commission grants towards the States’ share, only ₹1,149.14 crore, or 47.88%, was received through budgetary support during the 10 years examined, the audit found. “When the Green India Mission was conceived in 2010 as part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), it placed strong emphasis on monitoring, planning, and effective implementation.
Because enhancing forest and tree cover is a central component of India’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement, the mission is particularly important to India’s climate commitments.
This lack of convergence also affected financing, the report said. The Congress party criticised the government over the issues flagged by the CAG, with the party’s Rajya Sabha MP and former Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh calling the GIM a “gigantic fraud”. In a post on X, he said, “The Green India Mission has been a comprehensive failure — actually not just a failure but a gigantic fraud on the people of India. Ramesh said.
