Digital platform for India’s forestry and afforestation ecosystem

India has launched its first digital platform for seed traceability, in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). This was announced last week by UN-India. This has been launched by the National Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (National CAMPA), under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), in collaboration with the FAO.

Harit-SANKALP has been developed as a centralized digital solution and represents a significant step towards modernising nursery operations and strengthening accountability across the forestry and afforestation ecosystem. It is designed as a comprehensive, role-based digital workflow supporting advanced planning, inventory management, traceability, and monitoring — from seed source and nursery raising to the final dispatch of planting material. The portal enables forest departments across states to standardise processes, enhance coordination, and make informed, data-driven decisions. This will help strengthen planning, transparency, and traceability in nursery management and supply of planting material under forest nurseries.

As an FAO analysis highlights, India has come a long way since 1945, when it became one of the founding members of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a low-income, food-deficient country. Today, the country is not only self-sufficient in rice and wheat, but it also exports a range of food products. Moreover, at any given time, India has up to 60 million tons of food grain buffer stocks.

The UN press release about the venture states that a key feature of the platform is the generation of system-defined unique identification codes for every registered entity, including seed production areas, seed orchards, seed processing units, seed storage units, and nurseries. This uniform identification system eliminates duplication, ensures consistency across States and Divisions, and establishes a single, reliable source of nursery-related data. The portal also has a facility for booking for the procurement of plants by anyone in advance. It also auto-generates QR codes for nurseries and planting material batches, the press release adds. These QR codes provide instant access to detailed information through scanning, enabling efficient field-level verification, monitoring, and quality assurance. To begin with, all existing forest department nurseries across the States, which will be providing plantlets for the afforestation programme with CAMPA funds, are being mapped onto the platform and converted into a standardized digital format, with each nursery assigned a unique code and QR identity. Subsequently, it may be expanded to all the nurseries of the forest department. Harit-SANKALP enables end-to-end traceability of planting material, tracking each stage from seed sourcing and processing to nursery raising and dispatch. This strengthens quality control mechanisms and enhances accountability, particularly for CAMPA-supported afforestation and restoration activities.

Further, as the press release explains, to improve visibility and decision-making, the platform offers customised, role-based dashboards presenting real-time summaries of nursery capacity, planting material availability, bookings, and dispatch status across administrative levels. An online advance booking facility further supports improved production planning and demand forecasting by allowing field units and implementing agencies to book planting material in advance, aligned with plantation schedules. The system incorporates multi-level, role-based login and access control, aligned with the forest department hierarchy at national, state, circle, division, and range levels. This ensures decentralised data entry, controlled approvals, and secure access across administrative tiers.

As the FAO website points out, while agriculture in India has achieved grain self-sufficiency but the production is, resource intensive, cereal centric and regionally biased. The resource intensive ways of Indian agriculture have raised serious sustainability issues too. Increasing stress on water resources of the country would definitely need a realignment and rethinking of policies. Desertification and land degradation also pose major threats to agriculture in the country. India needs to improve its management of agricultural practices on multiple fronts. Improvements in agriculture performance can still improve nutrition through multiple ways: increasing incomes of farming households, diversifying production of crops, empowering women, strengthening agricultural diversity and productivity, and designing careful price and subsidy policies that should encourage the production and consumption of nutrient rich crops. Diversification of agricultural livelihoods through agri-allied sectors such as animal husbandry, forestry and fisheries has enhanced livelihood opportunities, strengthened resilience and led to considerable increase in labour force participation in the sector