The Bonn Challenge is a voluntary international pledge platform under which countries commit to bring degraded and deforested land under restoration. It is not a treaty and carries no penalty for shortfall; its force comes from public commitment and periodic progress reporting, which is why India's Second Progress Report matters as an accountability document rather than a compliance filing. India made its first pledge in 2015 and subsequently raised it to 26 million hectares by 2030, placing it among the largest pledgers in the world. The 21.76 million hectare figure covers the decade 2011 to 2020 and is deliberately counted across multiple land-use systems - forests, agricultural land, and soil and water conservation works - rather than forest planting alone. That breadth reflects a landscape approach: what restoration means on a degraded farm is not what it means in a forest or on an eroding catchment, so the intervention is matched to the ecological and socio-economic conditions of each landscape. The employment figure of 1.22 billion person-days follows from the same design, since much of this work is labour-intensive and rural.