How dense is India's forest cover, really? To critics, new data hides more than tells

The Forest Survey of India’s 18th biennial India State of Forest Report 2023, released on December 21, says 21.76 per cent of the country’s landmass is made up of forests, an alarming depletion of green cover when the global benchmark is 33 per cent. Taken along with the 3.41 per cent ‘tree cover’, Union minister of environment, forest and climate change Bhupender Yadav claimed 25.17 per cent of the area was covered with forests and that 1,445.81 sq km of forest area had been added between 2021 and 2023. A report by news agency Press Trust of India quoted experts, such as Kerala’s former principal chief conservator of forests Prakriti Srivastava, conservationist researcher Krithika Sampath and former National Board for Wildlife member Prerna Singh Bindra, as saying that the government had counted bamboo plantations, coconut groves and orchards, among others, as part of the forest cover and produced “another faulty report with inflated data”. Of the 1445.81 sq km of forest area that the report says has been added between 2021 and 2023, 1,289 sq km had been included under the term forest cover as ‘tree cover’. Minister Yadav states in his foreword for ISFR 2023: “In the NDC commitments made at the Paris Climate Change Agreement, India has resolved to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.” India’s carbon stock for 2023 has been estimated as 7,285.5 million tonnes, up by 81.5 million tonnes from the last assessment.