India’s vanishing forests are shrinking in real time, even as millions of dollars meant to replace them vanish into bureaucratic black holes. In theory, every hectare of forest razed for roads, mines or industry is meant to be “compensated” by planting new trees elsewhere, funded by a special CAMPA (Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority) corpus.
In practice, this well-intentioned scheme has become a byword for graft and mismanagement, with widespread allegations of fake plantations, diverted budgets, and deceitful accounting.
The country lost 2.33 million hectares of tree cover between 2000 and 2023 (a 6% drop) even as CAMPA coffers swelled. Locals, experts and auditors now warn that instead of replenishing forests, the scheme often enriches insiders – leaving frontline forest communities landless and new forests a mirage.
CAMPA’s original aim was simple: when forest land is diverted for projects, companies pay a levy. These funds are pooled at the national and state levels to plant and nurture trees on degraded lands, ideally doubling the lost forest. In reality, billions of rupees have piled up in CAMPA accounts without yielding commensurate saplings.
The MoEFCC itself has acknowledged that “less than half” of released funds got utilised by states in recent years. Audits and court cases show huge chunks of money being siphoned or idled.
For example, a Delhi RTI disclosure revealed that of over ₹51,768 crore released to states (2017–22), only ₹18,624 crore was actually spent on afforestation. Much of the rest sits unspent or was blown on unrelated items.
Compounding the problem is sheer paperwork: a Times of India investigation found that 70% of the data entered under the afforestation monitoring system (i-CCMES) was flawed or missing, making real tracking impossible.
Only about 30% of reported plantation areas have verifiable boundaries on government maps. In effect, planners can claim to have planted forests on paper — while real forests continue to vanish.
Throughout India, watchdogs and whistleblowers have flagged the rot. A 2013 audit in Odisha by the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) found that over half the tiny share of CAMPA money released remained unspent.
By then, Odisha’s CAMPA fund had swelled to ₹4,570 crore in interest alone, yet only 60% of diverted forest land had been actually reforested.
The CAG noted rampant irregularities: CAMPA funds had been used to buy cars and build range offices – expenses far from tree planting.
The auditors also flagged how forests diverted for mining had left promised offsets unpaid by user agencies, leaving tens of thousands of hectares unaddressed.
Last year, national media reported how even the Supreme Court intervened: it sternly demanded answers from Uttarakhand’s government on why laptops, refrigerators and even iPhones were purchased out of CAMPA funds.
In the Uttarakhand case, a bench queried how forest levies came to fund computer gadgets, remodeling of government buildings and court litigation. The CAG had documented that Rs 13.9 crore was spent on such “inadmissible activities” – exactly the kind of misuse CAMPA rules forbid. The court blasted the diversion as “a serious matter” and ordered top officials to explain themselves.
Behind the scenes, retired forest officers and activists describe a web of dysfunction. One former official observes that many in the system treat CAMPA money as just another line item – “We get funds every year exclusively to plant trees… we have to plant them somewhere, and this land has the most fertile soil”.
When pressed about the dislocation of local farmers, one officer quipped “They can go anywhere. They are not our concern”. Such attitudes have fueled anger among tribal communities, who say afforestation projects often ignore their rights and knowledge.
The Broken Promises of Afforestation
Legally, India’s approach to compensatory afforestation is among the world’s strictest. The Forest Conservation Act of 1980 mandates that any non-forest land diverted for industry, infrastructure or mining must be “compensated” by planting trees elsewhere. In practice, the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act (CAF Act, 2016) and its rules spread the responsibility across agencies.
At the center is the national CAMPA advisory body (chaired by the Environment Minister) and state CMPAs in each state forest department. If coal is mined from a forest tract, for instance, the mining company pays the net present value of that forest land plus charges for growing two times its area. These sums go to CAMPA pools.
The rationale is compelling: India pledged in its 2015 climate commitments to create an “additional carbon sink” equivalent to 2.5–3 gigatonnes of CO2 by 2030 from extra tree cover. Achieving that depends heavily on new forests paid for by CAMPA.
But experts caution the math is misleading. “The complex biodiversity of a forest can never be compensated for by a monoculture plantation,” notes analysts.
Young planted trees don’t sequester as much carbon as old growth. One study of India’s compensatory afforestation found that dead sticks and seedlings covering bare earth may show green on paper, but in reality they scarcely replace the climatic and ecological functions of lost forest.
Despite the lofty goals, execution has been poor. Forest Survey of India (FSI) reports show negligible net growth in real forest cover where diversions have happened. In Jharkhand, for example, a sample audit of plantations found most were substandard, with survival rates well below the mandated 60–65%.
Karnataka’s own forest auditors reported nearly half of plantation records were fictitious. A nationwide scoping study by journalists and scientists lamented that “CAMPA has turned into a cash cow for the forest bureaucracy, with little on-ground afforestation to show for it”.
Even internal official data paints a grim picture. The 2021 India State of Forest Report (ISFR) noted that for several states, net forest areas declined despite large compensatory planting targets. Observers point out that the methodology of FSI can mask losses. “Afforestation” funded by CAMPA is often very selective: they might plant eucalyptus or other fast-growing species on legal forest land, counting it as green cover, while letting natural forests dwindle elsewhere.
A senior MoEFCC scientist admitted that plantations are often in monoculture stands “which harbor little biodiversity” compared to the old-growth forest they were supposed to replace. He and others likened India’s compensatory strategy to greenwash: a project that makes numbers look good but fails environmental reality.
The nationwide CAMPA pools themselves illustrate the gap. The Ad-hoc CAMPA (pre-2016) had accumulated over ₹30,000 crore at its peak, even as release and spending lagged. A 2013 CAG report (before the official CAF Act) showed only 12% of called-for funds had ever been released and over half of disbursed funds still sat unutilized.
Five years after CAMPAct, the Union Environment Ministry admitted in Parliament (per an India Today story) that of ₹51,768 crore released (2017–22), only ₹18,624 crore had been spent on the ground. Though more states are now drawing down CAMPA money, the national balance still hovers near ₹50,000+ crore, earning interest as it waits for projects – a haunting reminder of promises unmet.
Voices from the Ground About Vanishing Forests
In the shadows of these policies are millions of people whose forests were diverted. Their voices bring a human dimension: many have been further impoverished by so-called “compensatory” schemes. In Chhattisgarh, where rich tribal forests often get cleared, the Baiga community has described a grim scenario. As reported by the Pulitzer Center, Baiga women from Phulwaripara village say they once cultivated modest crops and grazed cattle on communal land.
When forest authorities fenced off that land to plant teak under CAMPA programs, villagers protested. In retaliation, police – at the behest of forest officials – slapped colonial-era forest laws on the protesters, jailing those who dared speak up. “Our grandmothers and their grandmothers used this land for generations,” says one tribal woman; “we got nothing out of these plantations.” The quote highlights how CAMPA projects can become yet another force dispossessing indigenous people.
In Odisha’s tribal heartland, a similar story unfolded. Local communities told environmental NGOs that as forest department staff oversaw sprawling plantations, villagers were locked out. On the ground, the land the tribals once used for shifting cultivation was now ring-fenced. The communities recall being neither consulted nor informed. “They just came and cut up the land,” said one elder. Later, official reports confirmed a massacre of rights in the name of afforestation: thousands of acres were planted without seeking or even recording local consent. This caused rural anger and mistrust, fueling petitions in the National Green Tribunal demanding redress.
Maharashtra’s forest belts also saw trouble. In the Vidarbha region, surveyors found hundreds of hectares reported as newly planted were actually dense regrowth that the state shifted into CAMPA accounts. Locals there quietly noted that tree guards had taken bribes to slap a “planted” label on stands of the state’s own wild regeneration. A few brave forest guards blew the whistle, but their numbers were few. More broadly, the National Green Tribunal has commented that across India, CMPA plantation projects often involve rural people only as hired labour – rather than partners in stewardship. This echoes what even BJP government-appointed bodies have warned: that putting people at odds with planners undermines forest security.
These qualitative accounts tally with data. In all four focus states of our case studies, official audits and RTI responses reveal near-identical patterns: large afforestation budgets, small actual planting, and even smaller surviving saplings. In Madhya Pradesh, a state audit found ₹29 crore spent on teak plantations – despite strict rules banning commercial timber in compensatory afforestation.
Yet this plantation, on prime tribal land, served no public conservation purpose. In Chhattisgarh, informed NGOs obtained RTI replies showing hundreds of Lakh rupees earmarked for fireline maintenance and training that never happened. In Odisha, the Enforcement Directorate last year raided forest officials in Kalahandi: it traced ₹2.5 crore of CAMPA money through a tangle of bogus vouchers to dummy accounts. Maharashtra’s records similarly show dozens of state forest “annual planting plans” approved on paper while inspection teams find nothing on the ground.
Retired forest experts point out how the design invites such corruption. Funds are released in tranches and often rolled forward if not used, which incentivizes paper work rather than action. Tribals who lose land are offered little under CAMPA aside from vague promises of future “employment.”
Once dispossessed, many vanish from records. Even Supreme Court-mandated directives on involving Gram Sabhas in afforestation have been ignored in many states. A former Punjab forest chief commented wryly, “We had one officer who actually wanted to do the plantations properly. But his batches of seedlings kept disappearing from the nursery… so he just gave up.” Such anecdotes, told to investigators and journalists, describe a system where graft and apathy drown any good intentions.
State Case Studies: Four Regions, One Pattern
Chhattisgarh – Tribal Lands Fenced Out
Chhattisgarh, India’s second-most-forested state, has seen enormous afforestation budgets but questionable outcomes. One Greenpeace India survey, using satellite imagery, showed large tracts declared as newly planted under CAMPA schemes were already forested. An RTI from 2023 revealed state forest records listing over 3 lakh hectares as “afforested” since 2018 – nearly a quarter of all forest land used for industry – even though independent analysis suggests hardly half of that was replanted.
Locals say something is amiss. In Bastar, tribals describe how high-level “APO” (Annual Planting Operation) committees routinely approve projects with virtually no work done. “We stopped seeing saplings from the forest department years ago,” says a village councilor in Kondagaon district. “They fill reports at the office and claim payments. But real nurseries under CAMPA funds are often neglected; either trees die or are eaten by cattle.” A former state forest employee, speaking anonymously, confirmed auditors found that less than 40% of promised plantations in some divisions survived even three years after planting.
Pulitzer Center’s Shounak Dasgupta reported that Baiga and Gond women challenged the enclosure of their commons. They recounted being met not with dialogue but with FIRs (First Information Reports) under the 1865 Act on the books of British colonial forest laws. “Our children fear the forest now,” one mother said. “They think the forest is for official plantations, not for us.” Such testimonies underscore a deeper crisis: forest rights and modern afforestation often clash, with desperate rural voices lost beneath bureaucratic schemes.
Madhya Pradesh – Grandeur, Deception
Madhya Pradesh was an early adopter of afforestation drives, partly to meet climate pledges. Billboards across the state boast of millions of saplings planted. However, recent audits paint a cautionary tale. The CAG found that from 2017-2020, a whopping ₹167.83 crore of CAMPA money ended up outside genuine forest work. Projects included agroforestry schemes on private farmlands and the construction of a new forest department headquarters (a “Van Bhawan”) – neither of which qualify as compensatory afforestation under the rules.
State officials counter that much of it was for watershed dams and living infrastructure, but the auditors rejected this. They explicitly flagged ₹29.58 crore spent on teak plantations in Tarafa Forest Division, forbidden by law. A further ₹7.13 crore was quietly debited towards new salaries for foresters – ostensibly because posting and recruitment were CAMPA-funded.
These transactions yielded no new trees or habitat. The CAG also discovered that routine tasks like weed removal were charged multiple times: records showed that saplings in one wildlife division were “weeded” five separate times over seven months, billed separately each time.
The result: as journalism outlet The Analysis noted, money meant for restoration looked instead like a free-flowing budget for pet projects and padding.
Ground verification by activists tells the same story. In Mandla district, villagers say they planted thousands of seedlings under a CAMPA scheme, only to see official tallies of “additional plantings” off by factors of ten. “Our own records showed 150,000 saplings planted; the department’s logs said 200,000,” one local leader said.
NGO field teams found that half the workers paid by CAMPA were “ghost labor” – listed on payrolls but absent from worksites. Overall, the European NGO Fern concluded in 2022 that “Madhya Pradesh’s afforestation targets are largely met on paper; the forests see very little difference.”
Odisha – Audit, Enforcement, but Pervasive Gaps
Odisha has some of India’s densest forested areas and concomitant mining-driven diversions. The state’s CAMPA fund holds some of the largest balances, and audits going back a decade have been scathing. The 2013 Times of India story on Odisha’s CAG audit noted that only 12% of funds from 2009-12 were released for afforestation, and 51% of that was unspent.
Even recent years have not improved much. Official data shows new diversions of over 10,000 hectares each year, but afforestation of just 6,000–7,000 ha – leaving a chronic shortfall.
In one famous case, forest officials admitted to an Enforcement Directorate probe that they had routinely used CAMPA funds for illegal purposes. In 2025 raids in Kalahandi, ED seized files and bank transfers showing that Rs 2.5 crore meant for tree planting was funneled to personal accounts of junior officers.
Among the charged items were casual contract jobs allegedly “toothless” schemes with no record of plantation. The ED report noted how one range office had 15 accounts but little actual plantation data. As a local activist said, “CAMPA is like honey for the colony; everyone wants a taste.”
On the ground, the Odisha government’s famous “Harrela” greening campaign (paid for partly by CAMPA interest) has drawn mixed reviews. In some areas villagers saw new check dams and grass barriers — a rare win. But elsewhere locals complain that trees planted under CAMPA have died for lack of care.
A farmer from Sundergarh district demonstrated his point by showing a one-year-old sapling in a concrete block – allegedly one of 60,000 seedlings planted in that block! “They come, do a formality, take pictures, and move on,” he said. Meanwhile, the forests diverted by mining companies like NALCO and Vedanta have still not seen mandated compensations.
Odisha’s own mining commissioner once admitted on record that huge shares of calculated compensatory levies (NPV charges) have never been collected – a fact the CAG had also noted.
Maharashtra – Green Labels, Real Loss
Maharashtra calls itself the “Green State of India,” yet its record on compensatory afforestation is troubling. According to MoEFCC data cited in 2019, over 1 million hectares of forest land have been diverted for projects since 1980 – across road projects, dams, and industry. The theory is that for each hectare lost, an equivalent forest area should be regrown. In practice, Maharashtra’s CAMPA balances are large but use slow, and audits show problems.
For example, an internal study by the state forest department found that “afforested” land reported in one division did not match actual tree cover seen by FSI satellites. In one district, records claimed 500 ha afforested; remote sensing showed only 120 ha of green change. Activists in the Western Ghats note that some plantation plots are on plain grassland or legal protected forests – areas that can’t be diverted anyway – effectively creating bogus offsets.
One notorious controversy involved the Sanjay Gandhi National Park on Mumbai’s edge. In 2020, it emerged that funds collected for the park’s eco-park development (a CAMPA scheme) were missing. An investigation found that funds had been split into multiple small accounts, with no clear tracking. A local protester quipped, “For SAMGREEN (Save Aarey and MIG forests), money seems to grow in trees in the accounts, not in saplings in the soil.” This reflected a broader sentiment that in Maharashtra, as in other states, the forests keep disappearing even as CAMPA projects multiply on paper.
State auditors have also questioned Maharashtra’s compliance. A 2022 CAG review noted that the government frequently approved green-clearance applications without verifying if past offsets had been done.
It cited cases of companies delaying tree-planting or taking longer than the six-year legal limit, with officials giving extensions with few checks. The CAG concluded that by fast-tracking clearances, authorities effectively “licensed” deforestation, believing future plantations would magically appear. In reality, villagers around Jubbalpalli or Bhusawal saw cleared hillsides remain bare for years after trees were paid for on paper.
In fairness, not all of Maharashtra’s experiences are negative. Some success stories exist, such as reforestation in Tilari wildlife sanctuary using CAMPA funds where staff worked with locals. But these remain exceptions. The prevailing evidence – from budget figures, satellite maps, and community reports – is that Maharashtra has yet to truly honor its afforestation commitments.
How The System Fails and What It Means
Taken together, these cases paint a uniform picture: state forest departments are under immense pressure to show they’re planting trees in order to unlock funds. Local realities and ecology often take a back seat to ledger entries and paper trails. The design of CAMPA is partly to blame: it entrusts planning and spending to the same bureaucracies that sanction deforestation, with limited independent scrutiny. The nodal CAMPA office in Delhi has scant power to verify if a state’s ₹100 crore plan of operations actually resulted in saplings surviving to maturity. And by allowing accumulated interest to be spent on “forest protection” and government infrastructure, the Act left loopholes wide open.
Former insiders argue that a root cause is how performance is measured. Forest bureaucrats get rewarded (in postings and promotions) for volume of plantations reported, not for any ecological metrics. The notion that “if it’s on Google Earth it’s planted” has become too literal. A widely cited investigative report found that satellite images of Maharashtra’s Gorewada Arboretum were repurposed to show new plantations elsewhere – a literal example of data laundering. Combine that with the fact that CAMPA funds must be spent or else get re-appropriated to other schemes, and incentives skew toward hasty or fraudulent recording over careful nurturing.
The Supreme Court itself has observed these tensions. In 2009, it mandated creation of CAMPA to fix obvious misuse, but also set the goal of treating CAMPA funds as a “sunset fund” to be depleted in planting trees. Almost 15 years later, the Court noted in a 2024 hearing that nine major states had spent only 34% of their CAMPA deposits, essentially becoming “banks for state forest departments”. The court questioned how putting laptops in shopping carts (as Uttarakhand did) or handing out tendered jobs to favourites could ever align with the concept of “afforestation.” Experts say courts will continue to intervene since the root issues – corruption and weak enforcement – go beyond administrative fixes.
At the community level, the failure is felt in many ways. A farmer who loses fields to a forest-drive afforestation project might get a nominal compensation from the state, but she sees a steel plant or a highway in the old grove’s place, while the new saplings (if they grow at all) offer no livelihood. Ironically, this uprooting without deliverance often increases pressure on other forests: dispossessed people look for fuel wood and grazing in remaining jungles. Socially, too, there is a breach of trust. One tribal council leader in Madhya Pradesh said, “When companies wreck our sacred groves, they promise CAMPA will fix it. But year after year, it’s only cash registers ringing, not branches growing.”
Yet the topic is also politically explosive, which is why some reforms are in the works. Environmentalists have pushed for bringing CAMPA under the National Green Tribunal’s ambit, so its spending is legally accountable. There are proposals to tie unused CAMPA interest back to communities for forest rights implementation. The Finance Ministry has considered pruning interest accruals to encourage spending. Tech activists have built independent monitoring tools like LandLook and satellite classification to show discrepancies. International agencies also have a role: India’s experience is being watched by other tropical countries as a cautionary tale. The backlash in Brazil and elsewhere against “offset” schemes for carbon and biodiversity is part of the global debate that India is now in center of.
Lessons from Abroad
India’s CAMPA troubles have parallels on other continents, where simple offset schemes often mask hard truths. In Brazil, large parts of the Amazon were supposed to be conserved or replanted through forest carbon deals. But investigators found major fraud. In one notorious case, Brazilian police traced a carbon project that claimed to have logged 104,700 m³ of wood in a given forest area. Satellite analysis revealed only about 48,500 m³ of logs were ever visible in that region. A federal agent reviewing the numbers reacted: “This is a fraud”. The extra volume had been plugged into the system by criminals to launder stolen timber – effectively selling deforestation as “forest protection.”
Indonesia provides another comparison. The country’s massive oil palm expansion often came with promises to reforest elsewhere or rehabilitate degraded lands with native trees. These pledges mostly vanished. A World Bank report found that only 8% of mandated compensatory planting by companies was on suitable ecological land. Investigations by Reuters and others uncovered that officials routinely overlooked companies dumping monocultures on barren lands or even simply paying fines to skip planting. As with CAMPA, the lack of enforcement meant offsets were largely symbolic. Major palm conglomerates have since been sued by investors in Europe for misleading claims of sustainability.
Even China’s celebrated reforestation drives carry warnings. Chinese government data boasted that the 2000s planting campaigns added 11,500 square miles of new forest per year – an area the size of Massachusetts. Yet scientists now question the depth of that “greening.” Much of it was fast-growing monocultures in arid zones, which often failed. One Chinese ecologist labeled the vast “Green Great Wall” project (started in 1978) as “more of a fairy tale” than realitye. A long-term study reported that by the time a forest plantation is decades old, up to 85% of the original saplings have diede. The lesson: planting a lot of trees means little if they don’t survive or support biodiversity.
These international lessons reinforce two points for India. First, compulsion to account in hectares or tons cannot substitute for genuine forest health. The complexity of ecology is such that any offset is inherently imperfect. Second, corruption and governance gaps are universal vulnerabilities. Where monitoring is weak and money flows easily, any scheme can be bent out of shape. In that sense, CAMPA’s troubles are not uniquely Indian – but India’s scale makes the stakes enormous.
Changing Course or Continuing the Charade?
As the evidence mounts, pressure grows to reform CAMPA. New rules (2022 amendments) aim to make spending more transparent, e.g. by requiring project baselines and more stakeholder input. The government has promised states more flexibility to use funds for community forestry and wildlife protection if afforestation lags. But activists warn that loosening restrictions without tightening accountability may only reallocate the rot.
What needs to change is tough oversight: independent audits must verify that saplings planted under CAMPA survive to maturity, and that statistics are ground-truthed. Civil society groups are advocating the setting up of a national watchdog outside the forest bureaucracy, with powers to sanction misuse. Some legal experts suggest making CAMPA subject to the Forest Rights Act, ensuring local communities have a voice in selecting sites and species. Others call for performance metrics based on forest quality, not simply area.
As it stands, however, the evidence of widespread irregularity suggests CAMPA is still falling short of its purpose. The forests that vanish today cannot be easily replaced tomorrow – a fact acknowledged by policy experts and the Supreme Court alike. One high court judge commented recently, “You cannot clap your hands and make a forest grow instantly.” The nation’s forest policy is supposed to be based on “precautionary and intergenerational equity” – yet the current system often treats forests and people as expendable.
In conclusion, India’s compensatory afforestation initiative has entered a critical test. For hundreds of communities from Chhattisgarh to Maharashtra, the promise of new forests has become an empty promise. For the country, it represents a battle between the ideology of green growth and the hard realities of governance. Will CAMPA become the flagship of lost forests – a fund fat with interest but thinned of actual trees – or will it be reformed into a genuine engine of renewal? The next few years will tell if India can reconcile its development needs with its environmental imperatives, or whether the forests will continue to vanish under the weight of fraud and indifference.
This Vanishing Forests investigation above draws on reporting and analysis from nonprofit watchdogs and the media. References Cited Below
Yale, Times of India, Times of India, Mongabay, Earth Dialogue, India Today, Climate Fact Checks, NDTV, Uniindia
*You May Be interested in Reading this investigative piece by the same author, “The Missing Billions: How India’s Electoral Bonds Scheme Changed Political Funding Forever“.
*Learn More About The Author Here.
