Compensatory afforestation, the CAMPA money and the schemes outside forests

Prelims and MainsCurrent affairs on this: Afforestation, restoration and conservation outside protected areas

When forest land is diverted for a mine, a dam or a road under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, the user pays for two things: compensatory afforestation on an equal area of non forest land, or twice the area of degraded forest, and the net present value of the forest lost, a sum per hectare the Supreme Court ordered in the Godavarman case in 2002. The money sat unspent until the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 created a National Fund and State Funds, 90 per cent to the States, and the authority known as CAMPA to release it for plantation, catchment treatment and wildlife. Around it sit the schemes that plant outside forests, the Green India Mission, the Nagar Van Yojana, Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam and the Green Credit Programme. India's climate pledge counts on them for a carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes by 2030.

• The mechanism, in the figure: the State forest department finds the land, the user pays the cost and the net present value, the sums go to the State Fund, 90 per cent, and the National Fund, 10 per cent, held in the public account, and the State plants and reports through the e Green Watch portal. About ₹54,000 crore was transferred to States when the Act came into force in 2018 to 2019. The criticism is constant: plantations of few species on land far from the forest lost, money unspent or spent on buildings, and a forest counted as replaced by saplings.
• The count: the India State of Forest Report, on its own foundation, puts forest cover at about 21.8 per cent of the country and forest and tree cover together at about 25.2 per cent; the national forest policy of 1988 wants a third. Trees outside forests, on farms, roadsides and in cities, are what tree cover counts and what most new planting adds.
• The schemes: the Green India Mission, one of the eight missions of the 2008 action plan, approved in 2014 to improve the forest that stands as much as to add cover, audited in 2026 as far behind target; the Nagar Van Yojana of 2020, a thousand city forests by 2027; Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam, the 2024 campaign to plant a tree in a mother's name; and the Green Credit Programme of 2023, where restoring degraded forest land to a set canopy earns a tradeable credit, on its own subject.
• Conservation without a boundary: other effective area based conservation measures, land outside the protected areas that still conserves biodiversity, count towards the 30 by 30 target of the global biodiversity framework; sacred groves, the orans of Rajasthan, the devrais of Maharashtra and the kavus of Kerala, are the oldest form; community conserved areas and elephant corridors are the others; and the Miyawaki method plants dense native stands on small urban plots.
• The world frame: the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, 2021 to 2030; the Bonn Challenge on the land degradation theme; and ex situ conservation, seed banks, botanical gardens and the National Gene Bank at Delhi, which keep what planting cannot.

Mains: A forest is a soil, a canopy and a community of species assembled over centuries; a plantation is saplings in rows, so compensatory afforestation compensates the ledger and not the ecology, and the honest use of the fund is to improve the forest that stands and to buy the corridors that connect it.

Further reading: Forest Conservation (MoEFCC)

See also: National CAMPA · The Green India Mission · The Green Credit Programme · Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures · Forest rights and forest clearance: the two tracks · The India State of Forest Report: what the numbers mean · Land degradation: the convention, the Atlas and the neutrality target · Protected areas: the categories