Look at this map. Nagpur 45 degrees Celsius. Ahmedabad 44 degrees Celsius. Prayagraj 43 degrees Celsius. Delhi 42 degrees Celsius. The entire country is a single dark-red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine. And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet. The past few days have been hell.Credit: Windy.comSo I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers. What I found was a policy conjob that has been running for over two decades. But before I explain what happened, let’s clear some definitions. A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest. A forest is a living system: soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species.It takes decades for a forest to become what it is. You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one. In 2001, India’s forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice: Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said. It chose the numbers. The Forest Survey of India (FSI) quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi. All forests on paper.The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO’s definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India’s FSI quietly dropped. The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same thing, that India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion.Also read: ‘Erroneous, Misleading’: 60 Ex-Civil Servants Challenge Environment Ministry’s Forest ReportIt took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning. The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency; it is the appearance of transparency. I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns.The con is not in what was hidden from experts – it is in what was never explained to the people it was done to. This is the con. It is not a technicality but a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement.For ten years after 2001, the Congress party governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what they meant. They did nothing. Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it.The BJP is different. When it returned to power in 2014, it came with something the Congress never had – an absolute majority and no coalition compulsions. Its government did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it. The Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act of 2023 removed legal protection from “deemed forests”. Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real. Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated. The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally.The 2001 change inflated the numbers. The 2023 change cleared the ground. Together they form a complete project. First make the destruction invisible, then make it legal. India today is one of the hottest regions on earth. Heatwaves that once struck the arid northwest now reach coastal cities, places that had never known this kind of heat. In 2024, India recorded its hottest year since 1901. This is not a mystery. Forests cool land. They hold moisture in the soil and release it back into the air as coolness.Also read: Interview | Why There Is Mistrust About Proposed Changes to Forest Conservation LawA living forest is not just a carbon sink. It is a cooling system, a water system, a climate system embedded in the ground beneath your feet. When you destroy forests, land heats up. When you destroy forests and pretend you haven’t, no corrective action is ever taken. The data says everything is fine. The policy says everything is fine. Meanwhile, the temperature rises. Deforestation is not the only reason India is burning. Global warming, reckless urbanisation, failing monsoons – these are all real and all compounding.But forests were India’s partial buffer against all of them. And that buffer was first faked on paper, then stripped away in law. It is worth noting that Kerala, Karnataka, parts of the northeast, have seen genuine recovery of forest cover. But that recovery reflects the will of state governments, not central policy. It happened despite Delhi, not because of it.Real forests, the kind that cool land, hold water and shelter life, cover just over 3% of India. The official number says 21%. The gap between those two figures is not measurement. It is a definition that was quietly rewritten in 2001 to make a crisis disappear on paper. The missing 17% is orchards, coconut groves, bamboo plantations, tea and coffee estates, rubber farms, eucalyptus plots, roadside tree lines and urban parks. All counted as forests.A tea estate in Assam. A coconut farm in Tamil Nadu. A eucalyptus plantation in Andhra Pradesh. A bamboo grove in Odisha. All forests on paper. Because in 2001, the FSI decided that any land with 10% tree cover qualifies. They just forgot to mention that the FAO, whose standard they claim to follow, explicitly excludes fruit plantations and orchards.This is not a rounding error. This is a policy decision. And it is why nobody fixed what was broken.There is a particular kind of governance that does not solve problems. It solves the appearance of problems. It changes the definition of drought instead of finding water. It changes the definition of poverty instead of reducing it. It changes the definition of a forest instead of saving one. In 2001, the FSI changed what a forest means. In 2023, the BJP changed what a forest deserves.Between these two acts lies two decades of rising heat, disappearing biodiversity, and a population told that its natural inheritance was intact while it was being steadily consumed. A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest. And a government that cannot tell the difference, or worse, one that can and doesn’t care, is not a government that will save you from the heat it helped create.Darab Farooqui is a screenplay writer. He wrote the screenplay for Dedh Ishqiya.This piece was first shared by Farooqui on X. Republished with permission.