Over 22,500 hectares of land taken up for mangrove restoration under MISHTI scheme, 85% of area in Gujarat

The Union government has taken over around 22,560 hectares of land to restore and protect mangroves under the Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Income (MISHTI) initiative in the last two years.

Almost 85% of the land under the project, 19,220 hectares, has been acquired in Gujarat alone.

MISHTI was declared in the Union Budget 2023-24 and was launched on June 5, 2023, with the aim of restoring and promoting mangroves as a unique, natural ecosystem and protecting and enhancing the sustainability of coastal habitats.

The Government of India states that the aim of MISHTI is to restore mangrove forests by taking mangrove reforestation/afforestation measures along the coast of India.

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, in response to a question in the Lok Sabha in August 2025, pointed out that under the scheme, an area of ​​22,560.34 hectares has been captured through convergence across 13 States/UTs for cultivation and restoration of degraded mangroves in 2023-24 and 2024-25.

After Gujarat, around 1060 hectares of forest land in Tamil Nadu, 837 hectares in Andhra Pradesh and 761 hectares in Odisha were used for mangrove cultivation.

Buying low in Bengal

However, in the State of West Bengal, which has the largest mangrove cover in the country, only about 10 hectares of land could be acquired within the scope of the initiative.

The total mangrove cover in the country is 4,991 km2, of which West Bengal alone has 2,119 km2; This corresponds to approximately 42% of the mangrove cover in the country. According to the latest report of Forest Survey of India (FSI) for 2023, Gujarat has the second highest mangrove cover of around 1,164 km2 (23%).

During his ‘Mann ki Baat’ program on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized the importance of mangrove restoration. Mr. Modi said that five years ago (Gujarat Forest Department) started planting mangroves near Dholera in Ahmedabad and “today mangroves are spread over three and a half thousand hectares on the banks of Dholera”.

The Prime Minister said, “The impact of these mangroves is seen all over the area today. The number of dolphins in the ecosystem there has increased. The number of crabs and other aquatic creatures has also increased compared to before. Not only this, migratory birds now come here in large numbers.”

Ajanta Dey of Nature Environment and Wildlife Foundation, an organization working for mangrove restoration in different states, including West Bengal, said MISTHI is a result of the multi-stakeholder participatory approach developed in West Bengal in 2020, where different schemes under MGNREGA were used for mangrove restoration.

Ms. Dey, whose organisation’s Sustainable Aquaculture in Mangrove Ecosystems (SAIME) model in the Sundarbans has recently been recognized globally, said the focus in West Bengal should be on mangrove restoration rather than just prioritizing new plantations.

He emphasized that the importance of mangroves in fragile ecosystems like the Sundarbans is that they act as biological shields and that a platform involving different departments of the State government is needed to create environment-supported natural regeneration of mangroves.