India needs shared digital infrastructure for nature

The Story in Brief

India has digitised land records for 97.37 per cent of the country and assigned Unique Land Parcel Identification Numbers to over 36 crore parcels. But nature is harder to digitise than a payment or identity: a single hectare can be simultaneously agricultural land, tree cover, degraded land, and common grazing ground, depending on which agency looks at it. This mismatch becomes urgent as India's climate policies, carbon markets, and green credits start attaching money to those labels. The India State of Forest Report 2023 treats orchards and bamboo as forest cover, but legally recorded forest land is different. Without a shared digital infrastructure, different programmes could create incompatible versions of the same landscape.

India's carbon market now allows offset methodologies for afforestation of mangroves and other lands. The Green Credit Programme has identified 4,391 hectares for eco-restoration across 12 States. Yet satellite imagery cannot tell whether tree-covered land is legally a forest, who owns it, or whether local consent has been obtained. A digital public infrastructure for nature would let carbon markets, restoration schemes, and land records find and compare the same underlying evidence, each retaining its own legal authority.