India's other green clearances — Forest, Wildlife & CRZ
The same open PARIVESH API that serves Environmental Clearances serves three more central clearances. Together they are the full green-clearance funnel a project passes through — and Forest Clearance carries something EC does not: the actual area of land, in hectares.
Forest Clearance is a second land-creation channel
Every Environmental Clearance answers "may this project pollute?"; Forest Clearance answers "may this project take this forest land?" — so it is the one register that measures land quantum. Of the 1.05 million ha in the pipeline (inflated by delisted applications and one ~74,000-ha outlier), the trustworthy figure is the forest land with final diversion orders granted:
For scale: the entire national industrial land bank shows ~253,720 developed-and-vacant acres. Forest diversion adds ~122,666 more acres of granted land-use change — a different channel (mining, linear infra, hydro), on a different clock.
Forest area by state
| State / UT | Granted ha | Granted acres | Pipeline ha |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tripura | 44 | 108 | 184,758 |
| Chhattisgarh | 8,061 | 19,920 | 146,970 |
| Madhya Pradesh | 21,146 | 52,252 | 146,905 |
| Maharashtra | 1,087 | 2,686 | 88,062 |
| Andhra Pradesh | 738 | 1,824 | 71,232 |
| Assam | 7,746 | 19,141 | 49,780 |
| Odisha | 1,611 | 3,980 | 44,518 |
| Arunachal Pradesh | 1,084 | 2,679 | 42,080 |
| Rajasthan | 1,343 | 3,320 | 35,289 |
| Meghalaya | 9 | 21 | 34,793 |
| Jharkhand | 17 | 42 | 26,582 |
| Karnataka | 81 | 200 | 26,109 |
Top user agencies (FC)
| Agency | Proposals |
|---|---|
| MAHESH NAIR | 1,697 |
| Jal Shakti Department | 1,223 |
| HIMACHAL PRADESH PUBLIC WORK DEPARTMENT | 769 |
| Public Works Department | 708 |
| BHARAT SANCHAR NIGAM LIMITED | 409 |
| Rural Development | 384 |
| JIO DIGITAL FIBRE PRIVATE LTD | 321 |
| Department of Irrigation | 279 |
What the three funnels say
Forest (42.0% of decided granted) — 88% are fresh Form-A diversions, but 40% of the register is auto-delisted, so the live decided pool is smaller than the headline count. Wildlife (10.7% granted) is the real bottleneck: 4,319 of 4,919 sit in process, most "Pending at Proponent" — projects near protected areas stall here for the National/State Board for Wildlife recommendation. CRZ (31.3%) is small and coastal (17 states/UTs) — the gate for ports, coastal industry and waterfront projects.
advanceSearchData?majorClearanceType=2|3|4), full Forest /
Wildlife / CRZ registers, fetched 2026-07-22. Grant rate = granted ÷ (granted + in-process); 'dead'
(rejected/withdrawn/returned) and 'delisted' (PARIVESH auto-cleanup) are excluded from the denominator, as in the
EC analysis. FC 'granted' = "Final Diversion Order Issued" or "Stage-II Accorded"; Stage-I in-principle is not
counted. The forest-area pipeline total mixes all statuses and is skewed by a single ~74,000-ha outlier — the
granted figure is the reliable one. Pipeline snapshot, not a time series. Data + refresh:
github.com/herrrickshaw/india-ec-subsector-analysis.
Corrections are displayed, never silent.
AI Disclosure: This article was researched and written with AI assistance (Claude Sonnet), drawing on publicly available government, industry, and academic sources cited above. AI-generated text can occasionally misstate figures or "hallucinate" details even when working from real source material — readers should treat this piece as a synthesis aid, verify any figure that matters to a decision against the cited primary source, and focus on the underlying material rather than this summary alone.
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