Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: The Green India Mission was built on a financing assumption rather than a financing line. Its own design expected convergence — money and labour drawn from the compensatory afforestation fund, the rural employment guarantee and State afforestation programmes, with the Mission’s own budget as the smaller part. The Comptroller and Auditor General has now audited ten years of that assumption.
Performance Audit Report No. 4 of 2026, on the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, was tabled in Parliament on 12 August 2026 and covers 2015-16 to 2024-25 across the 16 States and Union Territories for which the Ministry approved targets
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The financing record, as the auditor states it
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved ₹2,000 crore from the Twelfth Plan for the first four years, with ₹400 crore from Thirteenth Finance Commission grants towards the States’ share. Audit records receipt of ₹1,149.14 crore through budgetary support over ten years — 47.88 per cent of the approved outlay, a share this desk has recomputed and finds as printed. It puts the convergence funding not secured at ₹10,600 crore, which is more than five times the sanctioned outlay itself.
That ratio is the finding a finance reader should carry away. A programme whose principal financing route is convergence carries the risk of that route, and the audit records the risk crystallising: no effective alignment with the compensatory afforestation fund, the rural employment guarantee or other central and State afforestation initiatives; the Nagar Van Yojana and School Nursery Yojana operating in silos; six of 68 sampled annual plans of operation reaching the Ministry before the financial year began, and none approved on time.
Physical outturn, and the one bright reading
Against a target of 1.4 million hectares for improvement in forest cover quality, improvement was observed on 0.11384 million hectares; against the same target for an increase in forest cover, an increase was observed on 0.03409 million hectares. The report states the shortfalls as 91.87 and 97.57 per cent, and this desk’s recomputation from the target and observed figures agrees. Audit also records that its geographic information system analysis found no noticeable attributable change at 70 per cent of sampled sites, and that 14 States did not provide the required public web links.
Against that, audit records that Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were the only States to carry out any assessment of carbon sequestration between 2015 and 2025. They did the measurement that the Mission’s climate purpose depends on. The report separately records that flux towers installed in those States were left idle for want of maintenance planning by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, at an expenditure of ₹3.50 crore.
Status of the process
Stated precisely: the report was tabled on 12 August 2026; the Ministry’s Action Taken Notes on these paragraphs are not on the public record at the time of writing; no parliamentary committee has yet examined the report. What is set out above is the auditor’s finding at the stage of tabling. Blitz will carry the Ministry’s reply and the committee’s view when each is available. No individual is named as culpable here, and none was named in the document this desk read.
What India gains. India’s forest and tree carbon commitment is reported internationally, and the value of that report rests on the measurement chain this audit examined. An audit that says plainly where the measurement did not happen is what makes the eventual claim creditworthy — in the same way that an audited balance sheet is worth more than an unaudited one, whatever it says.
Offered only as corrective advice, to help the work move faster: the protocol the two States used for carbon assessment is the Mission’s most transferable asset and could be circulated as the standard; the flux towers already built need a maintenance line rather than a fresh sanction; and a programme financed principally by convergence needs its convergence commitments recorded as firm allocations at the start of the year, not assumed through it.