🔆 India’s Land Restoration Architecture
📍 India’s Commitments
🟢 Restore 26 million hectares by 2030 under the Bonn Challenge.
🟢 Pursue the NDC carbon sink target through restoration and increased tree cover.
🟢 India reported 21.76 million hectares restored during 2011–2020.
🟢 Restoration activities generated 1.22 billion person-days of employment.
📍 Major Programmes
🟢 Green India Mission (GIM): Forest restoration and expansion of green cover.
🟢 CAMPA: Compensatory afforestation.
🟢 Nagar Van Yojana: Development of 1,000 urban forests.
🟢 PMKSY + MGNREGS: Watershed, soil and water conservation.
🟢 National Agroforestry Policy, 2014: Promotes trees alongside agricultural systems.
📍 Key Challenges
🟢 Institutional convergence: Land restoration involves at least 8 Central Ministries, with no single nodal agency.
🟢 Finance gap: India has called for diversified, adequate, predictable and sustained international finance, indicating that domestic resources alone may be insufficient.
🟢 LDN accounting: India has not yet submitted a formal Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) target to UNCCD, creating a need to integrate restoration data with the LDN framework.
🟢 Monitoring: Restoration claims need stronger verifiable, landscape-level monitoring.
📍 Prelims Pointers
🟢 UNCCD: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (1994); one of the three Rio Conventions; Secretariat at Bonn.
🟢 Bonn Challenge: Global restoration pledge — 150 million ha by 2020 and 350 million ha by 2030.
🟢 LDN: Land Degradation Neutrality; linked to SDG 15.3.
🟢 IUCN: Co-launched the Bonn Challenge.
🟢 ICFRE: Houses the Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Land Management.
🟢 NAPCC: Comprises 8 National Missions, including the Green India Mission.
🎯 Mains Question
India’s Bonn Challenge commitment and land restoration achievements have both environmental and socio-economic dimensions. Analyse the challenges of translating India’s restoration pledges into verifiable on-ground outcomes, with reference to institutional convergence, financing and monitoring. (15 marks, 250 words)
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