There has been no shortage of half-baked and ill-conceived policymaking in the last 11 years. The latest in this series of planned misadventures is the Great Nicobar mega-infrastructure project. The totally misplaced ₹72,000 crore expenditure poses an existential danger to the island’s indigenous tribal communities, threatens one of the world’s most unique flora and fauna ecosystems, and is highly susceptible to natural disasters. Nevertheless, it is being insensitively pushed through, making a mockery of all legal and deliberative processes.
Uprooting tribals
The Great Nicobar Island is home to two indigenous communities, the Nicobarese tribe and the Shompen tribe (a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group). The ancestral villages of the Nicobarese tribals fall in the project’s proposed land area. The Nicobarese were forced to evacuate their villages during the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. This project will now permanently displace this community, ending its dream of returning to its ancestral villages.
The Shompen face an even greater threat. The Island’s Shompen Policy, notified by the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs, specifically requires the authorities to prioritise the tribe’s welfare and “integrity”, when considering “large scale development proposals.” Instead, the project denotifies a significant part of the Shompen tribal reserve, destroys the forest ecosystems where the Shompen live, and will cause a large-scale influx of people and tourists on the island. Ultimately, the Shompen will find themselves cut off from their ancestral lands and unable to sustain their social and economic existence. Yet, the Government is stubbornly adamant and shockingly insistent.
The Constitutional and statutory bodies set up to preserve tribal rights have been sidestepped throughout this process. As in Article 338-A of the Constitution, the Government should have consulted the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes. It has failed to do so. The Government should have consulted the Tribal Council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island. Instead, the Council Chairman’s plea that the Nicobarese tribals be allowed to return to their ancestral villages has been neglected. A Letter of No Objection was secured from the Council, but it has since been revoked, with the Council noting that the authorities had “rushed them” into signing the letter.
Due process and regulatory safeguards set up to protect local communities have been evaded. The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) conducted as per the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 should have considered the Nicobarese and Shompen as stakeholders of the process and evaluated the project’s impact on them. Instead, it omits any reference to them altogether. The Forest Rights Act (2006), which empowers the Shompen as the authority to protect, preserve, regulate and manage the forests, should have underpinned any policy action. Instead, the Shompen have not been consulted on this issue — a fact which the Tribal Council has now confirmed. The country’s laws are being mocked wholesale. Unconscionably, one of the country’s most vulnerable groups may have to pay the ultimate price for it.
The farce of compensatory afforestation
Ecologically, this project is nothing short of an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. The project will require the cutting down of trees on an estimated 15% of the island’s land, decimating a nationally and globally unique rainforest ecosystem. The Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change estimates that 8.5 lakh trees may be cut. This is a depressing figure, but it may also be a gross underestimate — independent estimates have suggested that 32 lakh trees to 58 lakh trees may eventually be cut.
The Government’s solution to this indiscriminate tree feeling is that of ‘compensatory afforestation’, a rather poor substitute for the loss of natural, old-growth forests. Inexplicably, the planned afforestation is in Haryana, a State that is thousands of kilometres away, and in a decidedly different ecology. In a tragedy bordering on farce, a quarter of this land planned for afforestation has now been auctioned off by the Haryana Government for mining. In any case, compensatory afforestation may help assuage a guilty conscience but is simply no substitute for the destruction of multi-species, biodiversity-rich natural forests. The planned port site is also controversial with some of it falling under the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) 1A. Port construction is prohibited in CRZ 1A areas due to the presence of turtle nesting sites and coral reefs.
Despite abundant evidence confirming the same, which includes a National Green Tribunal order, the Government has contrived ways to manipulate this truth through a high-powered committee (HPC). The report of this HPC and the ground-truthing exercise it conducted to reclassify the port site out of CRZ 1A has not been made public.
Flaws in methodology
From a wildlife standpoint too, the project raises serious concerns. Primatologists have written to the Government expressing grave concerns about the project’s impact on the Nicobar long-tailed macaque. These concerns have been ignored. The biodiversity assessments for the projects have come under questioning for critical methodological flaws. The assessment of sea turtle nesting sites was conducted in the off-season for nesting. Drones were employed to gauge the project’s impact on dugongs, but these drones have limited capacity and can only assess shallow areas. Evidence has emerged that the institutes were made to conduct these assessments under highly unusual conditions, bordering on duress.
Finally, the project — including the port — is coming up in a seismically sensitive earthquake prone zone. The tsunami of December 2004 saw a permanent land subsidence of about 15 feet. The 6.2 magnitude earthquake in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in July 2025 only reminds us of this ever-present threat. Locating such a massive project here deliberately jeopardises investment, infrastructure, people, and the ecology.
Our collective conscience cannot, and must not, stay silent when the very survival of the Shompen and Nicobarese tribes is at stake. Our commitment to future generations cannot permit this large-scale destruction of a most unique ecosystem. We must raise our voice against this travesty of justice and this betrayal of our national values.
Sonia Gandhi is the Chairperson, Congress Parliamentary Party
Published – September 08, 2025 12:16 am IST