Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: A scheme designed to work by convergence must first converge. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s performance audit of the Green India Mission, tabled in Parliament on 12 August 2026, describes a mission built on the assumption that several funding streams would meet at the same patch of ground, and records what happened over ten years when they did not.
Performance Audit Report No. 4 of 2026 on the Green India Mission — Union Government, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change — examined the planning, implementation and monitoring of Mission interventions in 16 States and Union Territories for which physical and financial targets had been approved by the ministry, over the period 2015-16 to 2024-25. The Mission’s objectives were to increase forest and tree cover, improve the quality of forest and non-forest land, improve ecosystem services including biodiversity, hydrological services and carbon sequestration, and raise forest-based livelihood income for households living in and around forests.
The finance, in the auditor’s figures
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved an outlay of ₹2,000 crore from the Twelfth Plan for the initial four years of the scheme, alongside ₹400 crore from Thirteenth Finance Commission grants towards the States’ share. Against that ₹2,400 crore, audit records that only ₹1,149.14 crore — 47.88 per cent — was received through budgetary support across ten years of implementation, from 2015-16 to 2024-25. Blitz has recomputed that proportion from the two figures published by the auditor and finds it consistent with the percentage printed.
The larger financial finding concerns money that was never a budget line at all. The Mission’s strategy assumed convergence with the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and other central and State afforestation programmes. Audit records that this convergence was absent across all institutional levels, that schemes such as Nagar Van Yojana and School Nursery Yojana operated in silos, and that collative Annual Plans of Operation were not received — and that the lack of convergence led to the non-attainment of ₹10,600 crore in proposed funding support. The planning calendar tells the same story: of 68 sampled Annual Plans of Operation, only six reached the ministry before the start of the financial year, and none was approved on time.
CAG Report No. 4 of 2026 : Green India Mission, 2015-16 to 2024-25, as audited
| Parameter / Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Outlay approved by CCEA for the initial four years | ₹2,000 cr |
| Thirteenth Finance Commission grants towards States’ share | ₹400 cr |
| Received through budgetary support over ten years | ₹1,149.14 cr · 47.88% |
| Proposed convergence funding not attained | ₹10,600 cr |
| Sampled Annual Plans of Operation received before the financial year began | 6 of 68 |
| Target for improvement in forest cover quality | 1.4 mha |
| Improvement in quality observed | 0.11384 mha |
| Target for increase in forest cover | 1.4 mha |
| Increase in forest cover observed | 0.03409 mha |
| Expenditure on flux towers for carbon measurement, idling | ₹3.50 cr |
Selection, measurement and monitoring
The audit’s planning findings run alongside the financial ones. The envisaged bottom-up approach was not followed in identifying areas or assigning physical targets. Although vulnerability was a stated criterion, landscapes of low to moderate priority were selected over those more exposed to climate change. On measurement, audit records that no State except Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh assessed carbon sequestration at all between 2015 and 2025, and that improper planning by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education regarding maintenance and upkeep left the flux towers installed in those two States idle despite expenditure of ₹3.50 crore. On monitoring, 14 States did not provide the required public web links, eight States and Union Territories did not maintain annual accounts, and where accounts were prepared they often remained unaudited or showed discrepancies against subsidiary records. Audit evaluation found inflated data and achievements overstated on the strength of non-validated KML files, and a geographic information system analysis showing that 70 per cent of sampled sites had no noticeable change attributable to the Mission.
The status of the reply
The desk states what it could not establish. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s press brief of 13 August 2026 does not carry the ministry’s response to these findings, and no reply has been reproduced here that the desk has not read. Whether an Action Taken Note has been filed, and what view the Public Accounts Committee has taken of this report, could not be determined from the primary document available, and no position has been attributed on either.
What Blitz would add
The auditor’s own diagnosis points at the remedy, and it is an administrative one rather than a fiscal one. A mission whose design depends on convergence cannot be run through a separate plan document that arrives late; the finding that only six of 68 Annual Plans of Operation reached the ministry before the financial year began is the single most fixable thing in the report. Aligning the Mission’s plan cycle with the CAMPA and MGNREGS calendars, so that one landscape plan draws on all three, would recover much of what the audit records as lost. The measurement gap has an equally practical answer: the flux towers in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh exist and have been paid for, and a maintenance contract with a named institution would put a carbon number back into a mission whose central promise is carbon. And since the audit found 14 States without public web links, publishing plantation sites and validated geo-coordinates on a single national dashboard would let verification happen continuously rather than once a decade. The Mission’s objectives are not in question. Its calendar and its instrumentation are.