National Assessment of Afforestation Activities in India, a Key SDG Target, Under the World’s Largest Social Safety Scheme

Sustainable development strives to achieve ecologically compliant development through greening activities and poverty alleviation. Major national developmental programmes of India do have components that cater to targets set by SDGs. MGNREGA is one of the key flagship programmes acknowledged globally for its persistent efforts in mandated job provision in rural India. Afforestation an important activity under the Drought Proofing category, it has a clear relation with SDGs goal-1 to poverty alleviation, 15 aiming life on land and 8 referring to decent work and economic growth. Geo-MGNREGA a distinguished effort of applying geospatial technology through a web-enabled GIS platform, Bhuvan developed by ISRO that has brought in an unprecedented compilation of database on activities carried out in MGNREGA since its inception. Field inventory used a mobile application customized for the purpose by above 0.2 million field functionaries to record the asset created under this scheme. Current attempt, aims to bring out the national level asset patterns using a 5 × 5 km grid-based approach. The current study has analysed about one million geo-tags associated with afforestation across the Indian subcontinent. Spatial analytics carried out using Optimized Hotspot was revealed dominant clusters in Telangana state of Southern India followed by Andhra Pradesh. Second level hotspots within the large zone of peak activity showed in the central Telangana zone witnessing a high degree of activity. Higher emphasis is given by the administration since the 2013–14 or citizen-oriented greening initiative has bought in shape district performance zone. In this subcategory, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states was witnessed 6.3 and 2.8 lakh completed assets. Best performing geographic envelopes were identified through a statistically robust approach. Further, the Mann-Kendall test was used for understanding the monotonicity of temporal trends in asset creation. A total of 423 blocks showed positive mono-tonic trends and only 43 blocks comprised negative monotonic trends. Indicating increasing performance of villages for planting activities. Such analysis will help to deeper insights into drivers of successful accomplishment, input for planning and achieving SDGs.