Mission for Green India, MGNREGA will converge to facilitate afforestation on 10 million hectares of land

NEW DELHI: The Centre has decided to extend its flagship rural jobs scheme to include afforestation as part of a move to create more durable assets through the programme that Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently derided as a living monument to the previous UPA government’s failures and promised to overhaul.

Officials said the National Mission for a Green India (GIM) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will now converge to facilitate afforestation on 10 million hectares of land over the next decade.

This would, in turn, help provide forest-based livelihood income to three million households. Budget 2015-16 has made an initial allocation of Rs 34,699 crore for MGNREGA, with a possibility of an increase of Rs 5,000 crore if buoyancy in tax collection allows, making it the highest allocation to the scheme since it was launched in 2006.




“Convergence of GIM with MGNREGS will help bring about better coordination in developing forests and their fringe areas, ensuring economic security to the backward sections in the rural sector,” a senior government official told ET.

According to the official, the ministry of environment, forests and climate change and the rural development ministry have jointly agreed to converge the two schemes with a combined mission to increase the forest cover in the country by five million hectares while improving the quality of another five million hectares of forest land and increasing the forest-based livelihood income of about three million households.

“The progress of plantation under this convergence would be periodically monitored, using the remote sensing data, and photographic evidence shall be captured on a monthly basis,” said the official, requesting not to be named. The mission targets 10 million hectares of forest/non-forest land in 10 years, starting from 2015, and funds for the mission will be shared by the two central ministries.

All wages under MGNREGA will be met as a 100% central grant while the material component will be shared in 75:25 ratio between the Centre and state governments. Funds from Mission for a Green India will flow in 90:10 ratio for the Northeast and special category states, and in 75:25 ratio for the rest of India.

All lands including village common lands, community lands, revenue wastelands, shifting cultivation areas, wetlands and private agricultural lands will be eligible for afforestation under convergence.

The National Mission for a Green India is one of the eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change envisaging a holistic view of greening and focuses on multiple ecosystem services, especially biodiversity, water, biomass, preserving mangroves, wetlands and critical habitats.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had approved GIM as a centrally sponsored scheme in February 2014 with an aim to increase and improve the quality of forest cover and contribute to enhance ecosystem services along with reduction of carbon footprint as a co-benefit. Employment scheme MGNREGA, introduced by the previous UPA regime, promises 100 days of work in a year to every rural household.