E-Paper
Next governance reform must begin with environmental data
This article is authored by Ankit Mishra, ICSSR Fellow, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute.
India runs one of the largest groundwater monitoring networks in the world. The Central Ground Water Board has tracked water levels through close to 23,000 observation wells four times a year, in some cases since 1969, according to CGWB records. That is a genuinely impressive institutional commitment, sustained across five and a half decades. But a 2018 World Bank assessment found that none of these original stations carried digital water level recorders or telemetry, and that digital groundwater systems had been built at the central level but never fully operationalised by the states. A network built to measure something as urgent as a depleting aquifer still runs, in large parts, on a cadence designed before India had computers in government offices.
This is the real story of India's environmental governance. The country has built fast, granular, real-time data systems for tax collection, welfare transfers and digital payments, processing billions of transactions a month through UPI alone. Environmental governance has had no equivalent push. India does not lack the technical capacity to measure its environment in real time. It has chosen, again and again, not to prioritise it.
That groundwater problem is, in fact, the mild version of it, because water below the ground is at least still being measured, however slowly. Move to water on the surface and the gap stops being about speed and becomes a near-total freeze. The country's most recent national-level wetland inventory still rests on satellite imagery from 2006-07, mapped at 1:50,000 scale under a project run with state remote sensing centres, as recorded on the official Wetlands of India portal. Wetlands regulate floods, recharge aquifers and support migratory birds. India's working map of them predates the smartphone, and unlike groundwater, there is no quarterly cycle quietly refreshing it in the background.
Forests push the problem one step further, turning it from a question of speed into a question of trust. Groundwater data is old. Wetland data is frozen. Forest data, when audited closely, cannot always be taken at face value even when it looks current. Between 2014 and 2024, India diverted roughly 1.73 lakh hectares of forest land for non-forest use, a figure the environment ministry itself gave Parliament and that HT reported at the time, compiled in this summary. Every such diversion is meant to trigger compensatory afforestation, planting an equivalent or larger area elsewhere, tracked through CAMPA and its digital clearance portal, Parivesh, running since 2014. Yet a 2023 audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General, examining the South Sagar forest division in Madhya Pradesh, found that out of 1,66,685 saplings recorded as planted at two sites, Munderi and Singpur, physical verification turned up only 1,20,321, with 46,364 simply unaccounted for, as recorded in the CAG's 2023 report on the state forest department. This is not a data collection failure. It is a record that says one thing while the ground says another, and nobody catches the gap until an auditor walks the site years later, sometimes a decade on.
The pattern repeats across pollution monitoring, biodiversity records and climate adaptation spending, but the underlying diagnosis stays the same at every step of the ladder. India has invested in measurement infrastructure such as CGWB's well network, satellite-based wetland inventories, the Parivesh portal and the newer IN-GRES groundwater assessment platform built with IIT Hyderabad, but has not invested with equal seriousness in upgrading that infrastructure, refreshing it on a fixed schedule or opening it to independent verification. The plumbing exists. Nobody has been told to turn the taps fully on.
This matters because environmental decisions in India increasingly carry economic and diplomatic weight. Forest clearances unlock mining and infrastructure projects worth thousands of crores. Groundwater depletion across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan threatens the food security of the entire Indo-Gangetic belt. At COP30 in Belem, India pressed hard for faster, larger adaptation finance from developed countries. That argument would carry more weight abroad if India could show, in near real time, how much forest it actually has left, how fast its aquifers are falling, and whether its own afforestation targets are real on the ground rather than recorded on a form.
The fix does not require a new ministry or a grand mission. It requires the ministry of environment, forest and climate change and the ministry of jal shakti to do for environmental data what the finance ministry already did for payments: set a fixed deadline, publicly tracked, for fitting every CGWB well with telemetry, for refreshing the national wetland inventory on a five-year cycle rather than leaving it static for two decades, and for opening CAMPA's sapling and plantation records to the same kind of public, real-time audit trail that UPI applies to a bank transfer. India became a global leader in digital governance by deciding that data infrastructure was not optional. Its environment ministry now needs to make the same decision, on a named timeline, with a named owner. A country cannot govern what it refuses to measure.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Ankit Mishra, ICSSR Fellow, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute.
