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In November 2025, NISAR, the joint NASA-ISRO radar satellite that cost $1.5 billion and took over a decade to build, was declared operational. It now scans nearly every patch of Indian forest every 12 days, seeing through cloud cover and darkness, generating 80 terabytes of data daily. India co-owns the most sophisticated forest monitoring instrument ever put into orbit.
Meanwhile, in February and March this year, Similipal Tiger Reserve burned again.
Forest officials used a satellite, ISRO’s SNPP-VIIRS, which flagged thermal anomalies before any ranger on the ground did. The detection worked. What came next was leaf blowers and safety kits, the same response that followed the 2021 fire. Odisha is among the top three most fire-prone states in the country, alongside Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, a ranking that has barely shifted in years. The data keeps arriving, the institutional response leaves a lot to be desired.
This, then, is the state-of-affairs in India’s forests in 2026, and it is one strange problem. It is a familiar story. We don’t know what’s happening to our forests, so we can’t act. The real problem is the gap between what the satellites can see and how the government responds.
Last November, researchers at the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation published a study in Scientific Reports that ought to have landed harder than it did in Indian policy circles. Using JAXA’s ALOS-2 synthetic aperture radar, which can penetrate the cloud cover that blinds optical satellites for months over tropical regions, fused with NASA’s GEDI lidar data, which maps forest canopy structure in three dimensions from space, the team produced biomass maps at 100-metre resolution across the entire African continent. A decade ago, this was not computationally feasible. The exercise revealed that Africa’s forests, which had been gaining carbon through 2010, have since flipped. From 2010 to 2017, the continent lost approximately 106 million tonnes of above-ground forest biomass every year, equivalent to roughly 200 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. Carbon that had been quietly doing its work in standing trees was simply gone, and the satellite record made that legible for the first time.
Why does an African study matter for Indian forest policy? Because the same methodology, SAR plus lidar, continental-scale biomass mapping, identified something that India’s own monitoring architecture is structurally blind to. The losses in Africa were not driven primarily by headline deforestation, the process where forest becomes field and the change shows up clearly from space. They were driven by degradation, trees left standing while selective logging, low-intensity fires, and incremental encroachment strip biomass invisibly. A forest can lose half its carbon and still register as forest in a greenness survey.
India’s Forest Survey of India publishes its State of Forest Report every two years. The methodology measures green cover from optical satellite imagery. It cannot reliably distinguish ecologically rich primary forest from degraded secondary growth or monoculture plantation. Degradation, the slow kind, the kind that the Africa study identified as the real driver of carbon loss, is largely invisible to it. The cadence is a further problem, two years is fine for spotting trends; it is useless for intervention. Brazil’s DETER system detects clearance events within days and is operationally linked to enforcement in the Amazon, while the PRODES system provides the official annual deforestation rate. India has no equivalent. Between 2001 and 2024, India lost 2.31 million hectares of tree cover, releasing approximately 1.29 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent, much of it from precisely the gradual degradation that official statistics would not record as loss at all.
NISAR uses advanced radar to track subtle ecosystem damage almost weekly, even through thick clouds and dense forests. Working with international satellites since 2025, it provides India with highly detailed maps for monitoring soil and forest health. What doesn’t yet exist is the downstream architecture to turn that data into forest governance. No near-real-time degradation alert system. No processing pipeline that connects a radar return over a degraded patch of forest in Chhattisgarh to someone with the authority and the resources to act on it. The satellite is operational but the institutional infrastructure to use, is not.
This matters beyond ecology, because India’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs), approved by the Union Cabinet in March 2026, commits to a carbon sink of 3.5 to 4 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent through forest and tree cover by 2035. That pledge has a commercial dimension that is easy to underestimate. The voluntary carbon market, for all its dysfunction, is converging on satellite-based measurement reporting and verification (MRV), measurement, reporting, and verification, as its credibility standard. Independent, auditable, satellite-verified carbon stocks are becoming the baseline that buyers and regulators demand. Countries that can demonstrate them, will be able to monetise their forest carbon internationally. Countries that cannot, will be left making unverifiable claims into an increasingly sceptical market.
The communities who should be at the centre of this are currently absent from it. Gram Sabhas in Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, the same communities absorbing the heaviest toll of human-wildlife conflict and leading protests against forest diversion for mining, are, in principle, the stewards of the carbon assets that India’s NDC depends on. In practice, no MRV effort has reached community level, and no mechanism routes carbon revenue to Gram Sabhas. The data that could verify their stewardship is now orbiting overhead. The governance architecture to connect it to them does not exist.
Brazil’s community REDD+ programmes show this gap can be plugged. In areas where communities are trained to operate ground-truth sensors that validate satellite data, the MRV chain becomes both more accurate and more defensible. The satellite record provides independent verification; the community provides the ground truth that makes it bankable. India has not built this yet.
The 2025 Africa study showed what happens when a forest keeps its side of an arrangement that was never formalised: it absorbs carbon for decades, the satellite record eventually makes that visible, and by then the loss is already measured in gigatonnes. India is at a different moment, one where the monitoring infrastructure has just arrived and the governance infrastructure has not yet been built. That window will not stay open. NISAR is already scanning. The question is whether what gets built around it is equal to what it can see.
The tragedy of India’s forests in 2026 is no longer a lack of sight, but a failure of resolve. We have entered an era where our orbital surveillance is crystalline, yet our bureaucratic response remains blurred by a biennial reporting cycle and a “greenness” metric that masks internal decay. To bridge the last mile, India must move beyond the vanity of owning sophisticated hardware and invest in the software of governance. This means adopting real-time biomass monitoring that can distinguish a healthy ecosystem from a hollowed-out plantation, and empowering forest departments with the resources to act as fast as the satellites can see. Until the institutional response matches the velocity of the data, NISAR will remain a $1.5 billion witness to a slow-motion catastrophe we are choosing not to stop.
Ambika Hiranandani is a Visiting Fellow at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University. She used to be an environmental lawyer and is now an entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology, science and business.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth
