Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India told the world at Ulaanbaatar how much land it has restored. The figure worth attention is the second one — the employment the restoring generated.
Speaking at an IUCN side event at the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said India’s recently released Second Progress Report on the Bonn Challenge, covering 2011 to 2020, records 21.76 million hectares brought under restoration. In the same period the work generated approximately 1.22 billion person-days of employment. India’s Bonn Challenge pledge, made in 2015 and subsequently enhanced, is 26 million hectares by 2030.
The employment figure is the one that changes how the programme should be understood. Restoration is usually filed under environment; 1.22 billion person-days files it equally under rural livelihoods. Spread across the decade that is an average of roughly 122 million person-days a year of paid work in precisely the districts where the alternative is seasonal migration. It also answers the objection most often made against restoration targets in developing economies — that hectares are counted and people are not.
India at Ulaanbaatar. Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav told UNCCD COP17 that restoration is treated in India as rural development as much as ecology, and pressed for predictable international finance for land restoration.
Count only hectares and restoration is a forestry programme. Count person-days as well and it becomes an employment programme that happens to plant trees.
At a Glance
• Reported: 21.76 million hectares under restoration, 2011–2020
• Employment: about 1.22 billion person-days
• Pledge: 26 million hectares by 2030 under the Bonn Challenge
• Forum: UNCCD COP17, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
• Next reporting cycle: 2021–2025, with ICFRE and IUCN
• Three dimensions tracked: area restored, financial flows, employment
• Instruments: Green India Mission, CAMPA, Nagar Van Yojana, watershed and agroforestry work
The Minister was candid about what the exercise exposed. The reporting process, he said, highlighted the need to strengthen systems for monitoring restoration outcomes, financial flows and livelihood impacts — which is an official way of saying the measurement is not yet as good as the achievement. India is therefore running the next cycle for 2021–2025 with the ICFRE Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Land Management and the IUCN, built around three explicit dimensions: area restored, money spent, and jobs created. Committing in advance to report the financial column is the harder half of that promise and the more useful one.
India also used the platform to press a case on behalf of the countries doing this work: diversified, adequate, predictable and sustained international finance for land restoration and drought resilience. The delivery model at home is deliberately plural — the Green India Mission for forest and tree cover, CAMPA resources for compensatory afforestation, the Nagar Van Yojana for urban and peri-urban greening, and watershed development, agroforestry and soil and water conservation across the countryside. Restoration, as the Minister put it, cannot be delivered through a single programme or sector. Looking past 2030 the stated objective is not only to restore more land but to restore better, finance better, and deliver outcomes that can be measured. On the evidence of the person-days column, the measuring has already started.
