India, April 5 -- The approval granted to a compensatory afforestation proposal against the clearing of forest land in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district underlines much that is wrong with the policy. The proposal is to offset the destruction of a 937-hectare, unbroken block of dry deciduous forests in the district through an afforestation effort involving 23 patches of land about 1,000 kilometres away from the Gadchiroli site, in another considerably forested region (though with very different vegetation) on the Konkan coast.

Compensatory afforestation in India remains blinkered in practice. In focusing primarily on the carbon-sink role of forests, it loses sight of several ecological realities that define the natural biological assembla...