India’s journey towards becoming a developed nation by 2047 will require unprecedented investments in highways, railways, renewable energy, irrigation systems, industrial corridors and urban infrastructure. These investments are indispensable for sustaining economic growth, improving connectivity and enhancing the quality of life for millions. At the same time, every major infrastructure project raises an unavoidable environmental question: how should society compensate for the forests that are diverted for development?
For more than three decades, India has addressed this challenge through compensatory afforestation. The principle is straightforward. When forest land is diverted for non-forest purposes, an equivalent area is afforested elsewhere. Supported by the Forest (Conservation) Act, the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), and substantial financial resources, this approach has become one of the cornerstones of India’s environmental governance.
There is little doubt that compensatory afforestation has strengthened environmental safeguards. It has institutionalised the important principle that economic development should not proceed without accounting for ecological losses. It has also mobilised substantial investments in afforestation and landscape restoration. Yet the environmental challenges confronting India today are fundamentally different from those that shaped forest policy several decades ago.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, landscape fragmentation and increasing pressure on natural resources require us to ask a more fundamental question: Is planting trees the same as restoring forests?
The answer is increasingly no.
A mature natural forest is far more than a collection of trees. It is a living ecosystem built over decades through interactions among vegetation, wildlife, soils, microorganisms, hydrological processes and human communities. Such forests regulate water flows, recharge groundwater, stabilise soils, store carbon, moderate local climates, support biodiversity and sustain the livelihoods of millions of forest-dependent people. These ecological functions cannot be recreated simply by planting saplings on another piece of land.
This distinction between tree cover and ecosystem functionality is becoming increasingly important as India expands its infrastructure while simultaneously pursuing ambitious climate and biodiversity commitments. Success can no longer be judged solely by the number of hectares afforested or the amount of money spent on plantation programmes. What ultimately matters is whether ecological functions have been restored.
The experience of the Indira Sagar Multipurpose Project in Madhya Pradesh illustrates why this broader perspective is necessary. Commissioned in 2005 as one of India’s largest river valley projects, it involved the diversion of more than 41,000 hectares of forest land and required an extensive Environmental Management Plan that included compensatory afforestation, catchment area treatment, wildlife management and long-term environmental monitoring. At the time, the project represented one of India’s earliest large-scale efforts to integrate environmental safeguards into infrastructure development.
Two decades later, however, the project offers a valuable opportunity to revisit how ecological compensation should be evaluated. The relevant question today is no longer whether compensatory afforestation was carried out according to regulatory requirements. Rather, it is whether the ecological functions lost through forest diversion have been meaningfully restored. Have watersheds become more resilient? Have wildlife habitats recovered? Have degraded landscapes regained ecological integrity? These are the questions that increasingly define successful environmental restoration.
Historical evidence also suggests that forest sustainability depends on much more than plantation activity. Forest outcomes are shaped by interactions among livelihood dependence, community institutions, education, climatic conditions and ecological processes. This broader understanding reinforces an important policy lesson: ecological restoration is as much a social and institutional challenge as it is an ecological one.
India therefore needs to rethink the way it approaches environmental compensation.
One possible way forward is what may be termed Modest Ecological Compensation. The emphasis on “modest” is deliberate. It recognises that mature natural forests cannot be fully recreated within human planning horizons. Rather than lowering environmental ambition, the concept calls for the meaningful recovery of essential ecosystem functions through scientifically informed and context-specific restoration.
Under such a framework, compensatory afforestation would remain an essential component of environmental mitigation. However, it would become one element within a broader ecological restoration strategy. Environmental compensation would increasingly encompass biodiversity conservation, groundwater recharge, watershed restoration, wildlife connectivity, carbon sequestration, community participation and long-term ecological monitoring. In other words, compensation would be evaluated not simply by the number of trees planted but by the extent to which ecological resilience has been restored.
Crucially, this approach does not seek to replace India’s existing legal framework. The institutions established under CAMPA and related legislation remain indispensable. Rather, the proposal is to build upon these foundations by expanding the definition of ecological success. Measuring environmental outcomes through ecosystem functionality would better reflect both contemporary ecological science and India’s international commitments on climate change, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration.
Such an approach would also strengthen public confidence in environmental decision-making. Infrastructure development and environmental conservation are too often portrayed as competing objectives. In reality, both depend upon healthy ecosystems. Roads, reservoirs, industries and cities ultimately rely on functioning watersheds, stable climates, resilient landscapes and sustainable natural resources. Investing in ecological restoration is therefore not an obstacle to development but a prerequisite for making development more durable.
India has already demonstrated considerable leadership in developing institutions for environmental compensation. The next step is to ensure that these institutions evolve alongside advances in ecological science. Moving beyond area-based compensatory afforestation towards function-based ecological compensation would represent an important evolution in environmental governance.
As India enters an era of unprecedented infrastructure expansion and climate uncertainty, the objective should no longer be merely to replace the forests that are diverted, but to restore the ecological systems upon which both economic prosperity and environmental sustainability ultimately depend.
The real measure of success will not be how many trees are planted. It will be whether those restored landscapes continue to provide clean water, healthy soils, biodiversity, climate resilience and secure livelihoods for generations to come.
Saurabh Bandopadhyay is Senior Fellow at NCAER, New Delhi
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth