National mission for green India :-

• Green India Mission is one of eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change and aims at “protecting, restoring and enhancing India’s diminishing forest cover and responding to climate change by a combination of adaptation and mitigation measures”.
• The $7billion environmental intervention, laid out in 2011, seeks to put a third of the country under forest cover by increasing forest and tree cover to the extent of 5 million hectares (mha), besides improving quality of forest/tree cover on another 5 mha of forest/non-forest lands.
• The mission acknowledges the influence forests have on environmental amelioration through climate change mitigation, water security, food security, biodiversity conservation and livelihood security of forest-dependent communities.
• It hinges on decentralized participatory approach by involving grass root level communities and organizations in decision making, planning, implementation and monitoring.

How is it rooted in habits of neo colonial governance :-

• Tree planting is the focus :-
  • Obsession with tree-planting has its roots in the colonial forestry bureaucracy.
• Commitment to fixed rates of forest cover encourages tree plantations in ecologically inappropriate sites and conditions.
• Given that forest cover of Europe in the colonial period was estimated at roughly one-third, and that this region serves as the source of knowledge, law and statecraft ,afforestation rate of 30-33% became the widely accepted minimum for civilization.
• Afforestation typically extends the authority of Indian state forest departments in a way that is mostly at the expense of local livelihoods rather than in support of them.
• One problem of plantation ecologies in India is enthusiasm for fast growing species and exotic and invasive species, planted in the name of increasing land cover dedicated to ‘forest’.
• Aggressive afforestation projects in India also tend to draw attention to, and direct resources toward, tree-planting, without a concomitant commitment to addressing the drivers of widespread and large-scale deforestation.

The mission has also been criticised:-

• It has proved to be one of the most slow-moving missions in the NAPCC .
• At present, the ministry is hugely understaffed and short of experts with respect to the GIM.
• Lack of capacity building :-
  • Though the mission envisages an active gram sabha as the primary body at the decentralized level, no initiative has taken place with respect to capacity building at the ground level.
• Decentralized and participatory governance as envisaged in the mission document seems to be more in principle than reality.
• Approaches on carbon sequestration and the issue of forest diversion are largely neglected in the mission.
• Funding issues :-
  • The budgetary allocation for the mission has been shrinking over the years. The allocations for the years 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18 were Rs 72 crore, Rs 42.01 crore and Rs 47.80 crore respectively.
• Failed to reach targets :-
  • In terms of targets, the data available for the year 2015-16 and 2016-17 shows that the mission has missed its targets by a long shot.
  • In 2015-16, the plantations undertaken were 34 per cent short of the targets. The following year the shortfall was more than 40 per cent.
  • The mission has also lagged in providing alternative fuel technology to households to reduce emissions from burning of fuelwood and other similar fuels. In 2015-16, only 25 per cent of the target was matched .
• Data issues:-
  • Lack of baseline data will pose a problem in preparing a robust business plan for enterprise development
• No institutional mechanisms to handle watershed and biodiversity ecosystems.
• There is no clarity on the role of the Beat Office (the lowest rung of the Forest Department) that has a direct interface with village dwellers.

What needs to be done :-

• The incredible and beautiful diversity of the Indian ecological mosaic deserves a true ‘greening’ approach, that takes seriously the genius loci, the peculiarity of local systems, and restores  these with local people.
  • More focus on the following aspect :-
    • Gram sabhas and the committees mandated by the gram sabhas, including revamped joint forest management committees (JFMCs), will oversee the mission implementation at the village level. 
  • Apart from afforestation, protection and conservation are equally important.
  • Convergence with NREGA and CAMPA funds would mean a steady and consistent line of finance an essential requirement for the long term sustainability of any project of this scale.