India, June 5 -- After chopping nearly 500,000 trees for infra projects in the last year, the state government has decided to plant a hundred million trees this year under a campaign called 'Green Maharashtra, Prosperous Maharashtra'. The decision was taken at a meeting on Wednesday, and a target of another hundred million trees has been set for next year as well. CM Devendra Fadnavis said the campaign would succeed only if tree plantation became a public movement, and asked citizens to participate.

In the first term of the BJP government from 2014 to 2019, the then forest minister Sudhir Mungantiwar had announced a target of planting 330 million trees, a claim contested by the Congress. The Maha Vikas Aghadi government had announced a p...