When Counting Trees Replaces Growing Forests

When Counting Trees Replaces Growing Forests

The tension here is not between action and inaction - India has planted, by its own count, 140 crore saplings under one campaign alone. The tension is between what gets counted and what actually gets restored and the CAG's audit of the Green India Mission shows just how far apart those two things have drifted.

THE CASE FOR

Metric-Driven Tree Planting A government facing a genuinely degraded landscape needs something it can point to, fund transparently and mobilise citizens around and sapling counts do exactly that. Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam converted an abstract climate obligation into a personal, emotionally resonant act that ordinary citizens could actually participate in - something a hectare-by-hectare ecological restoration plan, however sound, cannot replicate at scale.

Quantifiable targets also create accountability of a specific kind: a minister can be asked "how many trees" in a way that "how much forest health" resists, because forest health takes a decade or more to show results, while a sapling count can be reported the same year.

In a democracy where budgets are approved annually and ministers face election cycles, metrics that produce visible, near-term proof of activity are not a distraction from governance - for a government under constant demand to show it is doing something now, they are often the only politically survivable form governance can take.

THE CASE FOR

Genuine Ecological Restoration But the CAG's numbers show what that trade-off actually costs: a scheme that achieved barely a tenth of its forest-quality target and four per cent of its cover-expansion target over a decade, while the tree-planting substitute that replaced it counts saplings on land that was never forest to begin with.

The Aravallis make the difference concrete - decades of quarrying and the invasive vilayati kikar cannot be undone by a "Green Wall" of fresh plantings, because restoration is not landscaping; it requires soil recovery, native species reintroduction and time measured in decades, not planting seasons.

India's own Paris Agreement commitment depends on a genuine additional carbon sink, not a reclassified one and a hectare of monoculture saplings outside a recorded forest does not sequester carbon or support biodiversity the way a restored, dense-canopy forest does.

When the metric becomes the mission, the state starts optimising for the number rather than the outcome the number was meant to represent - and the CAG's own report, however good at counting hectares and rupees, still cannot count what a living forest is actually worth.

WHERE THIS LEAVES US

TAN's position is that ecological restoration must be the primary mandate, with tree-planting campaigns retained only as a citizen-engagement layer sitting on top of it, never as its substitute. The case for visible, countable action is real, but it describes a communications strategy, not a restoration strategy and India has let the former quietly replace the latter over the past decade.

What would change this position is evidence that campaigns like Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam are demonstrably converging with CAMPA and forest-department restoration budgets rather than running parallel to them - until that convergence is verifiable, the counting continues to substitute for the growing.