Everyone who plants trees asks one question: is my tree still alive? For a forest department or a city body, that question usually arrives years late, from an auditor.
The problem: planting is counted, survival is not
Government plantation work is reported in saplings and hectares planted. What happens after planting day is rarely recorded, and audits keep finding the gap.
- A CAG audit in Odisha counted one plantation by drone. Of 10,000 plants on record, 1,837 were alive. The auditors also found survival records so incomplete that some plantations could not be verified at all.
- The Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee, reviewing compensatory afforestation in 2025, named weak monitoring of survival rates as one reason for shortfalls.
- The CAG audit of the Green India Mission found no noticeable change at 70 percent of the sites it checked with mapping tools.
None of this means people planted badly on purpose. It means nobody was watching once the planting was over.
Why field checks alone cannot fix it
Sites are spread across districts, some hours apart. Planting happens in the monsoon, when roads are worst. Most saplings that die do so in the first year, often before the next scheduled visit. By the time a team arrives, the chance to replace them that season has gone.
What Get Zero gives a department
- Every site checked every week, whether it is next to the office or six hours away.
- A survival figure per site, with dates, built from satellite images and drone counts where needed.
- WhatsApp alerts when a patch starts drying or stops growing, so the range staff can water, protect or replant in time.
- One view across districts, divisions and schemes, ready for CAMPA and Green India Mission reviews.
We do not plant your sites, so the numbers are independent. Read how the satellite check works or see all the ways governments use Get Zero.
The short answer
A department that plants every year needs to know, every week, which sites are alive and which are failing. That record is what turns a planting target into a forest you can prove. Book a demo and we will show you your own sites.
Common questions
How can a forest department monitor plantations across many districts?
By checking every site from satellite images on a fixed weekly schedule, and sending field teams or drones only to the sites where trees are failing. This covers remote sites as often as nearby ones, without a field visit to each.
Can satellite monitoring be used as third party verification?
Yes. The images come from public satellites, every site is read the same way on the same schedule, and every figure carries the date it was measured. Get Zero does not plant the sites it monitors, so it has no stake in the result.
Does plantation monitoring help with CAMPA and Green India Mission reviews?
Yes. Both programmes have been criticised for weak survival monitoring. A dated survival record for each site gives reviewers evidence of what grew, not only of what was planted.