CAG audit exposes the gap in India's climate mission delivery

CAG's performance audit of the Green India Mission (2015-16 to 2024-25) found only Rs. 1,149.14 crore released against a proposed Rs. 10,600 crore, weak convergence with CAMPA and MGNREGS, and financial control lapses in eight States. The findings undercut claims linking national forest-cover gains to GIM's own underachieved targets.

By Mahima Katal

New Delhi, Aug 16: The Comptroller and Auditor General's performance audit of the Green India Mission does not merely catalogue administrative lapses, it exposes a structural failure of a scheme central to India's Nationally Determined Contribution commitments. Launched in 2014 under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, GIM was meant to add or improve tree and forest cover over 10 million hectares combined. A decade on, spanning 16 States and Union Territories from 2015-16 to 2024-25, the CAG's findings suggest the Mission has functioned less as a coherent climate intervention and more as a loosely tracked disbursement exercise.

The funding shortfall is the audit's starkest number. Against a proposed outlay of Rs. 10,600 crore, only Rs. 1,149.14 crore reached the Mission through budgetary support over ten years, a fraction of even the Rs. 2,000 crore the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had approved for just the initial four-year phase. That a scheme tied to India's pledge of a 2.5-3 billion tonne additional carbon sink by 2030 was starved of roughly 89% of its proposed budget raises an uncomfortable question about how seriously the state has treated its own climate architecture versus how it has represented that architecture internationally.

Money, however, was not the only failure. The CAG's finding on convergence is arguably more damning, because it points to design failure rather than fiscal constraint. GIM was structured to work alongside CAMPA funds and MGNREGS labour guarantees, an efficient model on paper, pooling compensatory afforestation money with rural employment infrastructure. In practice, the audit found this convergence did not materialise, and allied schemes like Nagar Van Yojana and School Nursery Yojana operated in silos. A mission built on the premise of institutional coordination instead multiplied bureaucratic fragmentation.

The financial control lapses compound this. Eight States and Union Territories did not maintain annual accounts at all; others had accounts that were unaudited or internally inconsistent. For a scheme running for a decade, this is not a teething problem — it is a persistent failure of basic public accountability, the kind that makes independent verification of expenditure claims nearly impossible.

What makes this audit politically inconvenient is the contrast it draws with the government's preferred talking points. The Centre has repeatedly cited India's overall forest and tree cover, 25.17% of geographical area per the India State of Forest Report 2023, and third-place global ranking in net forest gain per the FAO's 2025 assessment, as evidence of climate delivery. The CAG's audit does not dispute those national figures, but it does something more precise: it isolates GIM's own targets from the broader national trend and shows the Mission-specific shortfall the aggregate numbers conceal. Attributing national forest-cover gains to GIM, when GIM itself underachieved against its own benchmarks, is the kind of statistical sleight that this audit makes harder to sustain.

The deeper argument here is about how India measures climate performance. An afforestation mission judged by hectares nominally covered or crores nominally released tells you little about survival rates, canopy quality, or actual carbon sequestration, the CAG says as much explicitly. Until monitoring frameworks are built around ecological outcomes rather than disbursement figures, audits like this one will keep finding the same pattern: ambitious mandates, thin funding, weak coordination, and accounts nobody can verify.