The Election Commission of India announced the schedule for assembly elections in five states on March 15. Assam and Kerala vote on April 9. West Bengal and Tamil Nadu vote on April 23. All results come on May 4. The Model Code of Conduct is in effect from March 15.
Coverage will follow the usual pattern: alliances, incumbency, caste arithmetic. What will receive less attention is that three of these five states are carrying documented ecological deficits that the incoming governments will own from day one. The deficits are recorded in the India State of Forest Report 2023, in National Green Tribunal (NGT) orders, and in Ministry of Environment submissions that two of these states have still not complied with. The election will not change what the data says. But it will determine who governs the forests.
In election discourse, forest governance and political mobilisation are treated as separate tracks. In Assam, West Bengal, and Kerala, they are not. Each state has a specific and documented ecological inheritance. Each election result will determine the political will of the government that manages it.
The India State of Forest Report (ISFR) 2023, released by the Forest Survey of India in December 2024, records that Assam lost 83.92 sq km of forest and tree cover between 2021 and 2023, with forest cover inside Recorded Forest Areas declining by 86.66 sq km, the third-largest decline among all Indian states. Canopy density inside those same recorded areas degraded across a further 1,699 sq km. When the report was released, the NGT took suo motu cognisance of its findings on Assam and summoned state officials in January 2025.
West Bengal has not submitted its forest encroachment data to the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) at all. As of March 2024, it was among ten states that had not complied with the ministry’s data-reporting requirement. Reminder letters were sent in May 2024 and again in early 2025. The NGT directed all non-reporting states to submit replies by February 25, 2025. There is no public record of West Bengal meeting that deadline.
Kerala submitted its data. Its encroachment figure stands at 49.75 sq km, among the lowest in the country for states of comparable forest extent. Between 2013 and 2023, Kerala was among seven states nationally that recorded an increase in forest cover, according to the same ISFR series.
Assam requires the closest reading because the government has been running large-scale eviction drives in the months directly preceding the election and presenting them as ecological protection.
In February 2026, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma informed the Assam Assembly that 1.5 lakh (0.15 million) bighas of land had been freed from encroachment in five years. He has since pledged to free five lakh (0.5 million) bighas if the Bharatiya Janata Party wins a third term. On the campaign trail this January, Sarma stated publicly that eviction drives in the state are targeting Miya Muslims and not Assamese people, using a term widely regarded as derogatory for Bengali-origin Muslims. He told voters the choice before them was between illegal immigration and Assamese identity.
The government’s stated basis for the drives is real. A MoEFCC report submitted to the NGT in March 2024 put Assam’s total forest encroachment at 3,620.9 sq km, the second-highest figure in the country. The Supreme Court has upheld the government’s legal authority to conduct evictions. Forest encroachment in Assam is a documented problem.
But a field investigation by Northeast Now published in January 2026 found that while large-scale eviction drives were carried out predominantly in Muslim-majority districts, vast stretches of protected forest land near Nameri National Park and Sonai Rupai Wildlife Sanctuary had been systematically encroached upon with apparent state complicity. Pucca, multi-room concrete houses had been constructed inside forest land in Biswanath and Sonitpur districts, undetected by the same enforcement machinery that demolished homes in Goalpara and Dhubri. The investigation concluded that the selective application of forest conservation law exposed an eviction regime driven less by environmental protection and more by identity politics and electoral calculation.
Debabrata Saikia, leader of opposition in the Assam Assembly, described the drives to The Wire as a political stunt to polarise votes ahead of the 2026 polls. Raijor Dal MLA Akhil Gogoi, quoted in the Assam Tribune in January 2026, put it more directly: “Everywhere it is Hindu-Muslim. He keeps repeating miya. If they are illegal foreigners, drive them out. You have spent two terms in power.”
The structural question the data raises is this: Assam’s forest cover inside Recorded Forest Areas has continued to decline through the same five years the eviction drives were carried out. The ISFR 2023 shows that decline continuing between 2021 and 2023. The drives remove one category of actor from the forest. They do not address deforestation for agriculture, infrastructure clearance, or corporate land allocation. According to the government’s own data cited by The Federal, Assam has lost at least 8,000 sq km of land to river erosion since 1951, leaving around a million families landless. Many of those families are among the encroachers being evicted. The incoming government inherits a 3,620.9 sq km encroachment figure, a declining forest cover, and a pattern of enforcement that the data and field reporting show has not stabilised the forest.
West Bengal’s problem is absence rather than action. Its total recorded forest land stands at 11,879 sq km, constituting 13.38 per cent of its geographical area, according to the West Bengal Forest Department. Down to Earth’s own reporting in September 2024 noted that the state’s unclassified forest cover figure had remained statistically unchanged in ISFR publications from 1995 to 2021, with no official explanation for the stasis.
The 25 states that did submit encroachment data to the NGT reported a combined total of 13,056 sq km under encroachment as of March 2024, nearly double the figure in the previous assessment, as reported by National Herald India and The Tribune. West Bengal’s share of that national figure is simply not known. The NGT order that requires the state to report exists. The deadline has passed. The number has not appeared.
A state that enters an election campaign without its forest encroachment data on legal record has no basis for making credible environmental commitments. The election creates a political occasion. The NGT order creates a legal obligation. Neither has produced a submission.
Kerala’s election raises a different question. The Left Democratic Front has maintained one of India’s stronger environmental compliance records across its current term. The question May 4 will answer is whether that institutional consistency holds through a change in government or a reduced mandate.
Environmental governance at the state level depends substantially on bureaucratic continuity and political will to enforce monitoring obligations. A thin mandate or a coalition structure with constituencies that carry land-use conflicts in forest areas changes the political calculus for every forest-related decision the next government has to take. Kerala’s 49.75 sq km encroachment figure and its decade-long forest cover increase represent an institutional track record. Whether it survives the election result is a governance question, not only a political one.
In Assam, the campaign is about identity and immigration. It is not about why forest cover inside Recorded Forest Areas continues to fall despite five years of eviction drives. In West Bengal, forest governance is absent from the campaign entirely, and the NGT non-compliance has not become an election issue. In Kerala, civil society engaged directly: the Sahyadri Environmental Summit produced a People's Environmental Charter in January 2026 that was formally submitted to representatives of all three political fronts on March 11, 2026. It has not entered the mainstream campaign.
Three actions follow from what the data shows. The incoming government in Assam should commission an independent assessment of whether eviction-based forest protection, as practised since 2021, has produced measurable improvement in forest cover or canopy density inside the cleared areas. Without that audit, the drives remain an enforcement action without an ecological outcome. The incoming government in West Bengal should submit its forest encroachment data to the MoEFCC within the first 90 days of taking office, as the NGT has directed. The timeline is already overdue. Kerala’s incoming government, regardless of party, should formally commit to maintaining the state’s environmental data-reporting compliance as a governance baseline.
Forest cover is not a peripheral concern in states where large populations depend on forest-proximate land, water, and livelihood systems. Three of the states whose voters go to the polls before May 4 sit inside India’s ecological data either at the top of the encroachment table, or as a missing entry in the national record, or as the exception that demonstrates what compliance looks like when it is treated as an institutional obligation rather than a campaign promise.
Sagari Gupta is a public policy researcher with over eight years of experience in social development, governance reforms, and data-driven policy analysis in India.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth