Jammu, April 22 -- India often celebrates its rising forest cover, citing encouraging statistics in national and global reports. With forests and tree cover together accounting for nearly a quarter of the country's land area and steady gains in global rankings, the narrative appears positive and reassuring. Yet, beneath these numbers lies a deeper and more complex reality: measuring forests merely by area and numerical growth is no longer sufficient to understand their true ecological health.
The dominant metric in India's forest discourse has been "forest cover"-a satellite-based estimate of land under tree canopy. While useful, this measure often blurs critical distinctions between natural forests, plantations, and scattered trees outsid...