INDIA’S GREEN CREDIT PROGRAMME (‘GCP’), established under the Green Credit Rules, 2023 (’the Rules’) and guided by the methodology for calculation of ’Green Credit’ in respect of tree plantation issued in February 2024 (’the Methodology’), is framed as an innovative, market-based response to the global climate crisis. It proposes a framework to reward environmentally positive actions through tradable Green Credits generated via activities such as tree plantation, watershed conservation, pollution reduction, and afforestation. However, even at its inception, the GCP reveals deep structural biases which prioritise technocratic control and administrative convenience over the constitutional and customary rights of forest-dwelling communities. This article critically examines the Rules and the Methodology, highlighting their focus on administrative control and market mechanisms while sidelining community rights and participation.
The Methodology represents the first detailed operationalisation of the Rules. It directed the State and Union Territory Forest Departments to identify degraded lands like open forests, scrublands, and wastelands, “under their administrative control” for tree plantation activities. Critically, clause 2 of the Methodology required that all land parcels used for plantations be free from all encumbrances and not less than 5 hectares in size. This clause appears bureaucratically neutral, but in practice, it reclassifies forest landscapes as vacant restoration surfaces devoid of human habitation or customary rights. The use of such ostensibly neutral language serves to categorise legally recognised forest rights as “encumbrances” and imposes procedural barriers through complex virtual platforms, thereby further marginalising forest-dwelling communities.
Applicants, whether individuals, corporations, or institutions, could apply to the Administrator (which is the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (‘ICFRE’) according to the Rules) to undertake tree plantations, and upon payment of government-determined costs, state forest departments were authorised to implement restoration/tree plantation within two years. Once the tree plantation was certified complete, the Administrator would issue Green Credits “calculated at the rate of one Green Credit per tree grown through the tree plantation on such land parcel, subject to minimum density of 1100 trees per hectare, based on the local silvi-climatic and soil conditions, on the certification of completion of tree plantation provided by the Forest Department concerned.” (paragraph 10) The planted area’s carbon and ecological value thus became the currency of environmental governance, while rights, livelihoods, and histories tied to that terrain were systematically abstracted out of view.
From 2024 Methodology to 2025 Modalities
A fresh Office Memorandum issued in September 2025 titled ‘Modalities for Taking Up Restoration of Degraded Forest Land under the Green Credit Programme’ (or ’the Modalities’) formally superseded the 2024 methodology. The 2024 methodology primarily laid out a straightforward, cost-based framework that directed forest departments to identify degraded, open forest or wasteland parcels of at least 5 hectares, free from encumbrances, for tree plantations. Its focus was on rapid operationalisation with minimal procedural layers, treating restoration as a state administrative function. It excluded customary or community rights by defining "free from encumbrances" in a manner that disregarded tenure claims by forest-dwelling communities, effectively rendering their claims invisible or legally void.
In contrast, the Modalities introduce a more detailed administrative procedure involving Detailed Project Reports (‘DPRs’), State and Divisional Nodal Officers, and the ICFRE as a central programme administrator, aiming for greater ecological rigour, transparency, and oversight. These modalities required formal documentation on employment generation and local manpower engagement and instituted a Digital Green Credit Registry for project tracking. Despite these procedural enhancements, crucial principles remained unchanged. Clause 6(ii) of the Modalities reproduces verbatim the earlier phrase: ”the land parcel shall be free from all encumbrances,” with no mechanisms to verify or recognise rights under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (’FRA’) or Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (‘PESA’). Thus, the Modalities preserve the methodology’s exclusion of community rights and autonomy, continuing to treat restoration as an administrative imposition rather than a participatory, rights-respecting process.
The 2025 transition expands bureaucratic detail and introduces employment visibility but maintains the core legal fiction of state-controlled land free for implementation without validating customary tenure or ensuring community consultation. Now embedded within a more procedural grammar, it continues to mean that the land must be legally unclaimed or undisputed, interpreted narrowly to exclude encumbrances of title or possession recognised by the state. What it does not account for is the coexistence of community-claimed Community Forest Resource (‘CFR’) areas or ongoing claims under the FRA. The Modalities require no rights verification, no consultation with Gram Sabhas, and no mechanism to prevent overlap with customary territories. Thus, while the administrative scope expands, the principle of exclusion remains structurally intact.
Inclusion as a new form of exclusion
A notable addition in the Modalities is the inclusion, within the DPR format set out in Annexure II, of a requirement to record “expected generation of employment” (part E, clause 5, of Annexure II to the Modalities). This provision also expressly encourages the engagement of local manpower in restoration activities. At first glance, this provision seems progressive as it acknowledges the socio-economic dimensions of restoration and links ecological work to livelihood creation. Yet, on closer examination, this clause reveals how participation of local communities is still conceptualised through the lens of labour extraction rather than rights recognition.
Community involvement here becomes a contractual input through manual labour within externally designed projects without any transfer of decision-making power, ownership, or benefit-sharing over restored landscapes. The bureaucratic emphasis on local manpower presumes that communities are reservoirs of physical labour, but not legitimate ecological stewards. This reinforces colonial and post-colonial hierarchies of control where forest workers restore lands owned and managed by the state forest department, and with the introduction of private corporate entities as stakeholders, the forest dwellers watch their lands transformed into instruments of credit and corporate compliance.
Even the employment promise is fragile because the DPRs need only ‘indicate’ the anticipated ‘man-days’ and the nature of jobs. There is no binding requirement for long-term livelihood integration, collective wage agreements, or sustainable revenue-sharing post-project. As such, the employment provision, while newly visible, functions as a discursive veil that conceals deeper exclusions: the denial of tenure, consent, and community governance and participation in decision-making on how their traditional homelands are used.
The Registry and the digital shift
While the 2023 Rules under Rule 10 had envisaged a Registry to record all Green Credit transactions, the 2025 Modalities have folded this mechanism into ICFRE’s administrative domain. A centralised Digital Green Credit Registry will now maintain project data, verification reports, and issuance records. This digital expansion enables state management and corporate traceability but excludes communities from visibility itself. Villages whose lands are restored or whose labour sustains these projects cannot access or contest entries in the database. Transparency remains vertical (toward regulators) rather than horizontal (toward affected communities). In India, where digital literacy, internet access, and computer infrastructure remain significantly limited, particularly in rural areas, the requirement for villagers in remote regions to assert or contest forest stewardship exclusively through online systems imposes a substantial barrier. This exclusionary digital design ensures that the villagers bring a sword to the gunfight because it effectively precludes meaningful participation by affected communities, given their lack of effective tools or practical capacity to comply, thereby undermining the principles of procedural fairness and access to justice essential under Indian law.
Administrative precision, legal ambiguity
There is, however, a clear continuity between the 2024 and 2025 frameworks, in that both share the legal fiction that forest land under “administrative control and management” is available for commercial restoration once “encumbrances” are cleared. The 2025 Modalities clarify financial flows, outline a ten-year project life cycle, and restrict the Green Credit Applicant from claiming usufruct or ownership rights, ostensibly insulating community interests. Yet, by failing to require the validation of rights under the FRA or the PESA, the new modalities continue to treat customary tenure as invisible. In effect, while certification has evolved, justice has remained largely unchanged.
The substitution of detailed statutory rules with executive modalities significantly increases regulatory opacity. While rules promulgated under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 (‘’ are subject to parliamentary scrutiny (Section 26 of the EPA, mandates that every rule made under the Act must be laid before both Houses of Parliament for a total of thirty days within one or successive sessions, allowing Parliament to modify or annul the rule, while any such changes shall not affect the validity of actions previously taken under the rule), executive instructions such as the 2025 Modalities, on the other hand, derive authority solely from delegated administrative power, lacking legislative deliberation. This paradigmatic shift from legislative law-making to executive modalities formulation transfers the GCP’s regulatory core from democratically accountable lawmaking to bureaucratic discretion, thereby constraining avenues for judicial or public challenge and entrenching exclusion. Notably, the 2023 Rules and subsequent 2024 and 2025 Modalities appear to operate beyond the substantive protective mandate of the EPA, which was enacted pursuant to India’s commitments at the 1972 Stockholm Conference for the protection and improvement of the environment and the prevention of hazards to human beings and property (as mentioned in the preamble of the EPA, 1986). Instead, these instruments facilitate a framework enabling ‘greenwashing,’ whereby corporate actors may offset forest land diversion and associated displacement of traditional forest dwellers by acquiring Green Credits through afforestation on so-called degraded lands, potentially overlapping with the customary rights of other marginalised communities, thus perpetuating environmentally destructive practices under the guise of compliance. Consequently, affected communities on both ends of this transactional framework are effectively deemed “encumbrances” within a legislative construct that undermines the EPA’s foundational objectives.
Restoration without restitution
The 2024 Methodology adopted a mechanistic approach, awarding one credit per planted tree and measuring success by area restored and credits generated, without considering community rights or livelihoods. The 2025 Modalities introduced more complex procedural requirements, including evaluating canopy density and tree survival after five years, alongside employment documentation. Despite these enhancements, the programme continues to marginalize communities by framing them as implementers under the employment clause and erasing their land rights through the “free-from-encumbrances” requirement.
The 2024 and 2025 Modalities exclusively apply to tree plantation under the Green Credit Rules. Without prompt reform that places citizens at the programme’s core, instead of viewing citizens as encumbrances, there is cause for concern about perpetuating exclusionary practices when expanding to other sectors such as water management, air pollution, and waste management. Should citizens be uniformly treated as encumbrances across all sectors, it would institutionalise systemic exclusion and dispossession, reducing communities to mere obstacles rather than recognising them as rights-holders with participatory governance roles. Such an approach contravenes statutory and constitutional protections for forest and environmental rights in India, threatens livelihoods, and undermines the environmental justice framework. Fundamentally, the Green Credit Programme is entrenched in exclusion, premised on assuming land availability for profit-driven actors, thereby displacing forest-dependent communities and perpetuating dispossession under the guise of sustainability.
