Good News Today — India's Forest Comeback: A Decade of Environmental Wins

India has completed one of the most sweeping environmental recoveries any country has achieved in recent memory — and the data backs it up. Over the past decade, a coordinated push across multiple government programmes has expanded forest cover, restored degraded land, cleaned up one of the world's great rivers, and brought green spaces into the heart of Indian cities.The Green India Mission has channelled hundreds of millions of dollars into forest expansion since 2015–16, with 3.2 lakh hectares of compensatory afforestation completed between 2020 and 2025. The Nagar Van Yojana programme has developed 626 urban forests across the country as of March 2026, targeting cleaner air and biodiversity corridors in some of India's most built-up areas.In the Aravalli range — stretching across Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat, and Delhi — 36,000 hectares of degraded landscape were restored in 2025 alone, as part of a longer-term target of 6.31 million hectares. The Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam tree-planting campaign reached approximately 262 crore saplings by December 2025, verified through digital tracking on the Meri LiFE portal.Meanwhile, the Namami Gange programme has completed 355 of 524 sanctioned projects to rehabilitate the Ganga River basin, with 138 sewage treatment facilities now operational.What makes this story stand out isn't any single initiative — it's the fact that several programmes are running in parallel, coordinated across different levels of government. Environmental protection has moved from the margins of policy to the centre of national development planning. The direction is clear, the data is real, and the momentum is genuine.This episode includes AI-generated content.