India, April 6 -- 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 assemblage within a region, their impact on the biome, and the role their continued presence plays in the region's natural health. For decades, compensatory afforestation in India was associated with plantation monoculture, often with tree species unsuitable for the ecology across large swathes of the country. The effects of such afforestation in terms of biodiversity loss and collapsing ecological systems have been documented. That has started to change, following grassroots activism and growing realisation within policy circles about the long-term harm of monoculture. But the Gadchiroli example underscores a persisting myopia -- even if the afforestation effort considered the ecological realities of the replacement sites in the Konkan region, the nature of the vegetation (wet deciduous to near-evergreen) varies significantly from what will be lost at the Gadchiroli site. So, in practice, the compensatory effort will focus on acreage rather than the ecological side of the forest loss. Policy must find an honest balance between ecological and developmental imperatives. For that, compensatory afforestation as a policy will need serious refining, making the ecological non-equivalence problem a key focus. Let it begin from Gadchiroli....