The government has put in place a National Mission for a Green India as part of the country’s National Action Plan for Climate Change with a budget of Rs 46,000 crores (approx. USD 10 billion) over a period of 10 years. The overarching objective of the Mission is to increase forest and tree cover in 5 m ha and improve quality of forest cover in another 5 million ha. Thus, the Mission will help in improving ecosystem services in 10 million ha of land, and increase flow of forest based livelihood services to, and income of about 3 million forest dependent households. The Mission is innovative in several respects:
• First, it proposes a fundamental shift from our traditional focus of merely increasing the quantity of our forest cover, towards increasing its quality and improving provision of ecosystem goods and services.
• Second, the Mission proposes to take a holistic view of greening, not merely focus on plantations to meet carbon sequestration targets. There is a clear and more important focus on enhancing biodiversity, restoring ecosystems and habitat diversity.
• Third, there is a deliberate and major focus on autonomy and decentralization. The Mission will be implemented through an autonomous organisational structure with a view to reducing delays and rigidity, while ensuring accountability.
- Local communities will be at the heart of implementation, with the Gram Sabha as the overarching institution overseeing Mission implementation at the village-level. The Joint Forest Management Committee would be revamped as Committees of the Gram Sabha. This is in consonance with the fact that forests are a source of livelihood for over 200 million people in the country, and hence centrality of their participation is critical.
- A key innovation is the idea of engaging a cadre of young ‘Community Foresters’, most of whom will be from scheduled tribes and other forest dwelling communities, to facilitate planning, implementation and monitoring of Mission activities at local level.
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