National Mission for Green India

The mission was launched in 2014 as a part of eight missions outlined under India’s action plan for addressing climate change. The mission aims at protecting, restoring and enhancing India’s diminishing forest cover and responding to climate change by a combination of adaptation and mitigation measures.

Major Goals

• To increase forest & tree cover to the extent of 5 million hectares (mha) and improve quality of forest & tree cover on another 5 mha of forest and non-forest lands. It has separate sub-targets for different forest types and ecosystems (e.g. Wetland, grassland, dense forest, etc.).
• To improve and enhance eco-system services like carbon sequestration and storage (in forests and other ecosystems), hydrological services and biodiversity, along with provisioning services like fuel, fodder, and timber and non-timber forest produces (Minor forest produce) etc. which are expected to result from the treatment of 10 mha land.
• To increase forest based livelihood income for about 3 million households in and around these forest areas.
• Enhance annual CO₂ sequestration by 50 to 60 million tons in the year 2020.

Issues

• According to the Economic Survey 2021, the mission was able to only achieve 2.8 per cent of its plantation target.
• As of March 2020, plantation under the scheme was undertaken on only 0.14 m ha land.
• A 2018 parliamentary committee report on GIM also found that the scheme was grossly underfunded. It reported that the scheme had also missed its targets by 34 per cent in both 2015-16 and 2016-17 financial years.