A Project Mired in Opacity

The warnings that vast chunks of forests, unique biodiversity and indigenous tribal communities face extinction seem to have gone unheeded in the wake of the Union Government deciding to hustle through the Rs 72,000 crore development project in the Great Nicobar Island sprawling over 9,000 sq. km. area. According to plans, the island will host a transshipment port at Galathea Bay, a power plant, an airport and a greenfield township on 160 sq. km land including 130 sq. km of freshly grown forest.

The project to be executed by Andaman and Nicobar Island Integrated Development Corporation (ANIIDCO) will drastically change the face of the ecologically rich island which was declared a biosphere reserve in 1989 and included in the UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere Programme in 2013. The project scheduled to be completed in 30 years will see a footfall of around 3.5 lakh persons which is 4,000 per cent more than the current population of 8,000.

A million trees, many of them belonging to rare species, will be sacrificed at the altar of development. Galathea Bay is an important Marine Turtle Habitat, as named under India’s National Marine Turtle Action Plan. The project is riddled with opacity as much of the work on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic when public consultation was impossible. Reports even point out that the Vimta Labs of Hyderabad was seen carrying out the EIA much before the project was contracted.

Perhaps no further proof is needed about it being just an eyewash. Even more laughably, while AECOM, the Gurugram based consulting agency, released the pre-feasibility report in March 2021, the island administration knew about the felling of the forest a year earlier, in October 2020. The project clearance was further shrouded in murkiness as the Ministry of Environment, Forest and ClimateChange (MoEFCC) website carried no minutes of Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) which authorizes the deforestation.

Even more curiously, the compensatory afforestation will be carried out in Haryana on a 269-acre land. It leads to the question as to how logical would it be to create a substitute forest thousands of miles away and how the benefits would accrue to the victimized territory. The project suffers from paucity of due diligence, given its vulnerability to earthquakes. During the last decade the island has received 444 quake shocks. The Nicobarese coast has undergone permanent subsidence of four metres during the 2004 tsunami.

If evidence is required, one could see the lighthouse on the Indira Point, the southernmost point on the long chain of islands, which now stands in deep seawater. The island is home to two aboriginal tribes i.e., Nicobarese and Shompen. The latter with just 200 individuals is categorized under Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PTVG). The National Tribal Welfare Commission was never consulted on the possible danger the two tribes would attract. In fact, the letter from the local administration has pointedly asked the project authority ‘to seek exemptions’ whenever such exemptions were needed in execution of the project.

Marred by countless contradictions, the project poses grave threat to the pristine island and its inhabitants. It will be in the fitness of things to revisit the project and permit only what can be executed without endangering the human lives and the flora and fauna.