India plants trees at a scale few countries match. The Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam campaign alone reached its target of 80 crore saplings by September 2024, and the national drive has planted about 262 crore saplings since June 2024, according to the environment ministry’s year-end review for 2025. State forest departments, CSR teams, city bodies and NGOs plant more every monsoon.
Almost every one of those programmes reports the same kind of number: saplings planted, or hectares covered. Very few report how many of those trees were alive a year later. That missing number is what plantation monitoring is for.
What plantation monitoring and tracking means
Plantation monitoring is checking a planted site again and again after planting day, to find out how many trees are alive, whether they are healthy and whether they are growing. Plantation tracking is the record that makes this possible: where each site is, what was planted there, when, and by whom.
Together they turn a one-day event into a result you can measure. Instead of “we planted 10,000 saplings”, you can say “we planted 10,000 saplings in July 2024, and 7,400 were alive in October 2025”.
That second sentence is rare in India today, and audits show why it matters.
What the audits found
Compensatory afforestation (CAMPA)
When forest land is diverted for a mine, road or dam, the project pays for compensatory afforestation through the CAMPA funds. A report by the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee, filed in July 2025, found that states completed 1,78,261 hectares of compensatory afforestation between 2019-20 and 2023-24, against a target of 2,09,297 hectares.
The survival figures states reported were wide. Arunachal Pradesh reported 40 to 75 percent, Meghalaya 40 to 70 percent and Himachal Pradesh 54 to 60 percent. The committee listed weak monitoring of survival rates among the reasons for the shortfall.
A drone count in Odisha
A CAG audit of afforestation in Odisha, released in August 2022, used a drone to count one plantation. Of 10,000 plants recorded in the plantation journals, 1,837 were alive: a survival rate of 18.37 percent. Physical checks of 41 plantations found 20 had failed.
The auditors also found that plantation journals, survival data and inspection records were incomplete, to the point that they could not verify some plantations had been carried out at all. Funds to maintain some plantations stopped after the first year.
The Green India Mission
The CAG’s performance audit of the Green India Mission, covering 2015-16 to 2024-25 across 16 states and union territories, was tabled in August 2026. As reported by NorthEast Now, it found observed forest cover gain of about 0.034 million hectares against a target of 1.4 million hectares, and no new tree cover at 70 percent of the sites it checked by satellite (GIS analysis). About three in four plantation records it examined had no location, species or survival data. The audit noted that the government’s figures described area reported as planted, not forest that could be seen to have grown. It also cited weak monitoring as a cause of the mission’s shortfalls.
None of these findings say that people planted badly on purpose. They say that once the planting was done, nobody was measuring what happened next.
Why survival goes unmeasured
There are practical reasons plantations in India are rarely tracked after planting day:
- Sites are spread out. A district or a CSR programme can have dozens of sites, some hours apart. Sending a team to each one, several times a year, costs more than most budgets allow.
- Planting happens in the monsoon. The weeks right after planting are the wettest and cloudiest of the year, when field visits are hardest.
- Most deaths happen early. Saplings that die in the first dry season are gone before an annual check. By then it is too late to replace them in the same season.
- Maintenance money runs out. Budgets often cover planting and a short period of care, then stop, as the Odisha audit found.
- Nobody wants a bad number. A survival figure can embarrass whoever reports it. Without an independent check, it is easier not to have one.
Why it can no longer be skipped
Three changes are pushing plantation programmes from counting saplings to proving survival.
Green credits now depend on survival. The Green Credit Programme’s tree plantation methodology was revised in August 2025. Credits are now issued only after at least five years, only for trees that survive, and only once the land reaches at least 40 percent canopy cover. Under the earlier 2024 rules, credits came soon after planting.
CSR reporting asks for impact, not activity. Larger companies must commission independent impact assessments of big CSR projects, and listed companies report on environmental performance in their BRSR filings. We cover what this means for plantations in CSR plantation monitoring: how to prove your trees survived.
Government bodies are building their own tracking. In August 2026 the Delhi Development Authority launched a digital plantation monitoring system with geotagged site uploads, year-round tracking and a third-party check of sapling survival.
How plantation monitoring is done
There is no single right method. Each one answers a different question at a different cost.
| Method | What it tells you | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Field survey with sample plots | Exact count of live and dead saplings in each plot | Slow and costly across many sites; depends on who counts |
| Geotagged photos from a mobile app | Proof that a site exists and was visited, with a date and location | A photo shows a few plants, not the whole site |
| Drone survey | Tree-level counts and crown sizes across a whole site | Needs a pilot and permissions; usually a few times a year |
| Satellite imagery (Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1) | Vegetation health for every 10 metre square, every few days, at any site | Sees groups of trees, not single saplings |
Satellite monitoring is the only method that watches every site on the same schedule at a cost that does not grow with distance. Sentinel-2 measures how strongly plants reflect near infrared light, which drops when leaves dry out or die. That signal is usually expressed as NDVI, the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index. Sentinel-1 radar sees through cloud, so the record continues through the monsoon. Both are free, run by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus programme. You can read more in how satellite tree monitoring works.
Because a satellite square covers 10 metres of ground, it cannot tell you whether one particular sapling is alive. It can tell you, months before an annual visit, that one corner of a site is drying out while the rest is healthy. That is when a drone or a field team should go and look.
What good plantation monitoring produces
Whatever methods you use, a monitoring programme should leave you with:
- A baseline. The boundary of every site, what was planted, how many, and when, recorded at planting time.
- A survival figure for each site at fixed dates. For example at three, six and twelve months, then every year until the trees are established. Our guide to measuring tree survival rate explains the formula and sampling.
- Early warnings. An alert when part of a site is declining, while there is still time to water, protect or replant.
- Dated evidence. Images and figures that an auditor, a board or a funder can check, not just a report that says the drive went well.
Where Get Zero fits
We started Get Zero after planting more than 10,000 trees with 100+ partner organisations in 31 days, going back to check, and finding that about one in ten had survived. Nobody had been watching. Get Zero checks every site every week using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 imagery, scores each 10 metre square, sends a WhatsApp alert when a patch starts drying, and counts trees by drone where you need it. You get a dated record of what is alive, for every plantation you run.
If you plant trees for a government programme, a highway, a company, an orchard or an NGO, see who Get Zero is for or book a demo and we will show you your own sites.
Common questions
What is plantation monitoring?
Plantation monitoring is the repeated checking of a planted site after planting day to record how many trees are alive, whether they are healthy and whether they are growing. It produces a dated survival figure for each site instead of a count of saplings planted.
Why is plantation monitoring needed in India?
Most plantation programmes in India report the number of saplings or hectares planted, not the number that survived. Audits of compensatory afforestation and the Green India Mission have found incomplete survival records and large gaps between reported planting and observed forest gain. Rules for green credits and CSR impact assessment now ask for outcomes, which only monitoring can provide.
How are plantations monitored?
There are four common methods: field surveys with sample plots, geotagged photographs taken with a mobile app, drone surveys that can count individual trees, and satellite imagery such as Sentinel-2 that tracks vegetation health over whole sites every few days. Most programmes combine two or more.
How long should a plantation be monitored?
At least until the trees are established, which for most sites means three to five years. Most deaths happen in the first year, so checks should be frequent early on. The revised Green Credit methodology of August 2025 only awards credits for trees that survive beyond five years.