India is about to spend Rs 3,000 crore over five years to restore something most people don’t know the country has: nearly 15,000 sacred groves — small forest patches preserved for centuries by local communities as spaces of spiritual and ecological significance.
The Aastha Van Sanrakshan Yojana, approved at the 7th Meeting of the Governing Body of National CAMPA on 10 July 2026, gives formal government backing and funding to the conservation of these groves across India. It is one of the more culturally unusual conservation investments to come out of a CAMPA meeting — and also one of the potentially more consequential, given what these groves represent ecologically.
Why Sacred Groves Matter for Biodiversity
Sacred groves are patches of forest left undisturbed by communities who consider them the domain of local deities or ancestors. They exist across India — from the devavana of Karnataka to the sarna of Jharkhand, from the orans of Rajasthan to the kovils of Tamil Nadu — in communities of vastly different religious traditions. What they share is a norm of non-extraction: no felling, no hunting, often no entry except during festivals.
The ecological consequence of that norm, maintained over generations, is that sacred groves preserve old-growth forest characteristics that have long since disappeared from the surrounding landscape. Studies across India have documented higher tree species diversity, more undisturbed soil structure, richer invertebrate communities, and in many cases the local survival of plant species no longer found elsewhere in the region. They function as microrefugia — biodiversity hotspots embedded in otherwise degraded agricultural or human-modified landscapes.
Their vulnerability is equally real. The social norms that protect sacred groves weaken over generations, particularly where younger community members migrate to cities, where religious syncretism reduces traditional taboos, or where economic pressure on land is simply too high. Many groves that existed fifty years ago have since been cleared. The Aastha Van scheme, with its five-year corpus of Rs 3,000 crore, is designed to provide formal legal and financial protection before that erosion accelerates further.
MISHTI Gets Extended and Expanded
The same CAMPA Governing Body meeting approved a significant expansion of the MISHTI (Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Tangible Incomes) programme. MISHTI was launched on World Environment Day 2023 with a mandate to restore approximately 540 sq km of mangrove cover across nine coastal states and four Union Territories. The initial outlay was Rs 100 crore. The meeting approved an additional Rs 500 crore — taking the total to Rs 600 crore — and extended the programme’s timeline to 2029.
The Rs 88.40 crore already released has funded mangrove plantation and restoration work across six states and UTs. The scale-up reflects both the ecological ambition of the scheme — mangroves are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on earth, and they protect coastlines from storm surge and erosion far more effectively than any artificial barrier — and the government’s assessment that the programme is working well enough to merit acceleration.
India’s mangrove cover has actually grown in recent years (the Forest Survey of India’s most recent report documented an increase), bucking a global trend of decline. MISHTI is designed to ensure that growth continues with deliberate intent, focused on restoration in states that have experienced the heaviest losses.
New Species Conservation Programmes Approved
Beyond sacred groves and mangroves, the CAMPA Governing Body approved funding for a set of species-specific conservation projects: a Conservation and Recovery Action Plan for River Dolphins, Project Snow Leopard Phase-II (including a second population estimation cycle), a Conservation Action Plan for the Indian Rhinoceros, and a pan-India conservation approach for the wild Water Buffalo. Support for the conservation of Manipur’s Sangai (the Brow-antlered Deer) was also continued.
These approvals sit alongside the Nagar Van Yojana (652 urban forests developed, Rs 571.50 crore released) and the Green Credit Scheme, through which Rs 7.28 crore has been channelled to ICFRE for plantation-based green cover expansion. Together, they paint a picture of National CAMPA as an institution expanding its scope from primarily compensatory afforestation into a broader forest and biodiversity conservation fund.
The Technology Layer
Two digital initiatives reviewed at the meeting deserve attention. The Digital Annual Plan of Operations system, rolled out for FY 2026-27, now requires all states and UTs to submit their CAMPA spending plans entirely online — with workflow-enabled approval, real-time monitoring dashboards, and fund utilisation tracking. Five zonal training workshops prepared state forest officials for the transition.
The Harit-SANKALP Portal, developed with FAO-India, adds QR-code traceability to individual plants — connecting each sapling planted under CAMPA to its verified seed source and nursery, with GPS tracking from planting to maturity. The intent is to prevent the common problem in compensatory afforestation programmes where saplings are planted on paper but never actually survive.
For a fund that has disbursed tens of thousands of crore over its history, the combination of digital planning and plant-level traceability represents a genuine accountability upgrade. Whether it translates into better survival rates for plantations is the question the monitoring data will eventually answer.
India’s environment sustainability future is increasingly tied to the ambition and follow-through of institutions like CAMPA. The Aastha Van scheme and MISHTI expansion are the kind of decisions that could leave a lasting ecological mark — if the implementation matches the intent. Meanwhile, the sustainable farming practices that often coexist with these forests could benefit enormously from the biodiversity that sacred groves and restored mangroves protect.
Source: Press Information Bureau, Government of India. Original release (PRID 2283233), 10 July 2026.