Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA)

The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) is the institutional apparatus India uses to recover the ecological cost of converting forest land to non-forest use and to recycle that money into afforestation. Its legal lineage begins with the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, which requires prior central approval before forest land is diverted for projects such as mining, dams, roads, or industry. The Supreme Court, in the long-running T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India litigation, found that the funds collected as compensation were lying idle and unspent in state treasuries. Through orders in 2001, 2002 and 2006, the Court directed the creation of a compensatory afforestation fund and an ad hoc managing authority, which functioned for over a decade before Parliament codified the regime in the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016, brought into force with the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Rules, 2018.

The procedural mechanics rest on a sequence triggered whenever a user agency seeks to divert forest land. Under the Forest (Conservation) Act framework, the agency must first obtain in-principle (Stage I) and final (Stage II) clearance. As a condition of that clearance, it pays two principal levies. The first is the cost of compensatory afforestation, computed on land equivalent to the area diverted—non-forest land of equal extent, or degraded forest land of twice the extent where non-forest land is unavailable. The second is the Net Present Value (NPV), a sum representing the value of ecological goods and services the forest would have provided over a fixed horizon, payable per hectare at rates the Supreme Court fixed and periodically revised. Additional levies include penal NPV, catchment area treatment costs, and funds for safety zones, wildlife management plans, or relocation of villages from protected areas.

The 2016 Act splits the corpus into two tiers. A National Compensatory Afforestation Fund sits in the Public Account of India and receives the NPV and inter-state or central-project monies; a State Compensatory Afforestation Fund in each state's Public Account receives the bulk—roughly ninety percent—of collections attributable to land within that state. The National CAMPA, an authority under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, sets policy, lays down guidelines, and monitors expenditure. Each State CAMPA, headed by the Chief Secretary or Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, prepares annual plans of operations through which divisional forest officers actually plant, regenerate, protect, and survey. The money is ring-fenced: it may be used only for afforestation, assisted natural regeneration, forest protection, wildlife habitat improvement, and allied activities, not for general state revenue.

Concrete implementation accelerated after August 2019, when the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change released approximately ₹47,000 crore of accumulated funds to the states, with the total corpus then cited near ₹50,000–54,000 crore. States such as Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand—rich in forests and heavily mined—received the largest tranches. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has repeatedly examined CAMPA expenditure; its reports flagged diversion of money to vehicles, buildings, salaries and even unrelated works, plantation on land already forested, and survival rates of saplings far below claims. The MoEFCC operates the e-Green Watch portal to track plantations geospatially, a response to these audit findings.

CAMPA must be distinguished from adjacent instruments. It is narrower than the broader Green India Mission, one of the eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, which pursues afforestation as a climate goal funded through budgetary allocation rather than user levies. It differs from the Forest (Conservation) Act clearance process itself: that statute grants or denies permission to divert, whereas CAMPA manages the money the diversion generates. It is also distinct from the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which vests rights in forest-dwelling communities and whose consent requirements frequently collide with the very diversions that feed CAMPA. Where the FCA asks whether land may be cleared, CAMPA asks how the ecological debt is repaid.

The regime remains contested. Critics, including the Campaign for Survival and Dignity and several gram sabha bodies, argue that compensatory plantations are raised on common lands or revenue lands over which Adivasi and other communities hold customary or statutory claims, displacing livelihoods without the consent the Forest Rights Act mandates. Ecologists question whether monoculture plantations—often eucalyptus or teak—reproduce the biodiversity of a felled natural forest, making the term "compensatory" misleading. A further structural debate concerns federalism: states complain of central control over money raised within their territory, while the centre points to uniform standards. The 2016 Act's premise that lost forests can be quantified in rupees and replaced elsewhere is itself challenged by the "no net loss" critique drawn from international biodiversity-offset literature.

For the working practitioner—whether a desk officer processing forest clearances, a UPSC aspirant preparing General Studies Paper III, or a researcher costing an infrastructure project—CAMPA is the financial hinge of India's forest-diversion policy. Understanding it requires fluency in the FCA clearance pipeline, the NPV rate matrix, the National–State fund split, and the audit and consent controversies that surround disbursement. The fund's sheer scale, exceeding ₹50,000 crore, makes it one of the largest dedicated environmental corpuses in the world, and its governance is a recurring subject of parliamentary standing committee scrutiny, CAG audit, and Supreme Court oversight. Mastery of CAMPA signals command of how India reconciles—or fails to reconcile—economic development with the constitutional mandate under Article 48A to protect forests.