Kolkata, Aug. 15 -- India's flagship forest-restoration programme has fallen dramatically short of its own target, with the Green India Mission adding just 0.03 million hectares of forest cover against a target of 1.4 million hectares over a decade, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has found.
The staggering 97.57 per cent shortfall, revealed in the CAG's performance audit report tabled in Parliament recently, has raised fresh questions over whether India's afforestation drive is delivering forests on the ground or merely counting saplings on paper.
The audit found that improvement in the quality of forest cover was recorded over only 0.11 million hectares against the same 1.4-million-hectare target - a shortfall of 91.87 per cent...