Great Nicobar’s Mega Project: A Costly Gamble with Forests, Biodiversity, and Indigenous Rights (2025)

A series of developments and new information that has come to light in recent months have raised further questions about the planned Rs.80,000 crore mega infrastructure project on Great Nicobar Island (GNI). The NITI Aayog–piloted initiative has four components: a transshipment terminal in Galathea Bay, an airport, a greenfield township, and a tourism project and gas-powered power plant.

One of the sources of new information is the minutes of a meeting held in Port Blair on October 4, 2024, under the chairmanship of the Managing Director of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation Ltd (ANIIDCO), the project proponent. The other is a series of letters exchanged since April 2024 between the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (MoPSW), the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), and the Andaman and Nicobar Administration.

Those who attended the October 4 meeting included senior officials of ANIIDCO, including its Managing Director and its General Manager; representatives of various departments of the Andaman and Nicobar Administration such as environment and forests, the public works division, the port management board, and the tribal welfare department; and representatives of Egis India Consulting Engineers Pvt. Ltd, a Gurugram-based consulting firm tasked with preparing the detailed master plan for the trunk infrastructure and township. (Trunk infrastructure refers to primary, shared infrastructure systems.)

Forest destruction

This component alone covers a massive 130 sq km of largely primary tropical rainforest of the total project area of a little over 160 sq km.

A key concern with the project from the very beginning has been the scale of forest destruction proposed, with a large portion allocated for the township that Egis is now planning. Initial numbers for trees to be cut ranged from 8.65 lakh, as mentioned in the March 2021 project proposal prepared by AECOM India Ltd to 9.64 lakh, stated by the government in Parliament. This gained further traction when, in August 2024, ANIIDCO invited expressions of interest for “enumeration, felling, logging and transportation of these trees”. This indicated, first and foremost, that the project proponent did not actually know the number of trees to be cut.

Recent media reports based on calculations done by scientists suggested that the 8.65 lakh number, staggering as it was, has been underestimated by at least a factor of three; most likely even more. One estimate suggested the trees standing in these 130 sq km of forests could be as many as 10 million. This alone vitiates the forest and environment clearances granted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in 2022—both because they were based on incomplete and inaccurate information, and due to the underestimation of the environmental impact and biodiversity loss.

Also Read | The Great Nicobar Project: A costly miscalculation?

The minutes of the October 4 meeting add many more dangerously comical twists to this story. It suggests, for instance, that various project-implementing agencies explore “the possibility of utilising the soft woods [cut from these forests] as biomass for power generation” and that the confirmation for the same “be obtained within one week”.

The forests of Great Nicobar are an unexplored biodiversity treasure trove besides being the traditional home to communities such as the Shompen, whose survival is intricately linked to these forests and who have special status under Indian law. Suggesting that millions of these trees be burnt for power generation is akin to someone entering a library and lighting up rare manuscripts for the evening barbecue or bulldozing an ancient temple and crushing the stones for use in road construction. The idea of a wood-fired power plant, bizarre as it might sound in today’s era, is not even part of the proposal.

Equally intriguing in the minutes of the October 4 meeting is the list of agencies that have shown interest in enumerating, felling, and disposing of the trees in response to ANIIDCO’s call. It includes Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd, RITES, MECON, EQMS Global, FALCON Resilient Infra, Ultra Tech, and Terracon India. Even a cursory look at their primary mission and vision shows that tree-felling operations are not part of their scheme of things and that they have no related experience or expertise.

It has become a case of anything goes. Indeed, if a company like ANIIDCO—that has only sold liquor, milk, and petroleum for more than three decades—can be entrusted with a Rs.80,000 crore infrastructure project in one of the world’s most difficult landscapes, entities that build railways and ports or sell consultancy services could also do anything, including counting trees, cutting them, and burning the timber for power generation.

Logging lessons from history

It is little realised, however, that tree felling and transporting timber in these islands have a difficult and complex history—not just in terms of tribal rights and biodiversity destruction but from a logistics point of view as well. Logging here goes back more than a century when it was started in the early 1900s by the British. Clear-felling of the kind now proposed in Great Nicobar was stopped in the islands many decades ago. Importantly, large-scale felling for commercial purposes ever happened only in the Andaman Islands; commercial and large-scale tree-felling was never allowed in the Nicobars. A look at the records of timber felled in the islands provides additional insight. The average extraction of timber in the islands (Andamans) from the late 1960s to about 2000, when logging was drastically curtailed, was about 1.2 lakh cubic metres a year. Even if one assumes that an average rainforest tree has about 3 cubic m of timber, this amounts to cutting of 40,000 trees a year. And if one goes by the project proponent’s original but grossly underestimated number of 8.65 lakh, it still means that it will take two decades of continuous logging to clear these forests.

Logging in a forest needs tremendous skill besides infrastructure, which includes heavy machinery and perhaps elephants as well. Getting it all in place will be a task in itself, and the basic numbers suggest that this is simply not possible within the period envisioned for this project. This would be an extremely difficult ask even in the Andaman Islands, which has a history of logging and the basic infrastructure for the same. To create this in Great Nicobar will be doubly difficult and raises serious questions about the timelines, project execution, and the project’s basic financial viability.

Nothing highlights the complications better than the interlinked issues of compensatory afforestation. In what is one of the most absurd and farcical cases of compensatory afforestation ever, the diversion of 130 sq km of pristine tropical forest in Great Nicobar is being compensated for by declaring 260 sq km of land in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh as forest land. Under this swap, in August 2024, the government notified 243.5 sq km of land in the Aravallis in Haryana as protected forest.

In what is a double whammy, however, 119.5 acres (48.36 hectares) of this very forest land was handed over almost immediately by Haryana’s mining department to a private entity for stone quarrying. This is a serious illegality whichever way one might choose to look at it.

Legal issues

There are also serious legal issues that emanate from the 2002 report of the Supreme Court–appointed Shekhar Singh Commission and the court’s orders based on it. While the project proponent says in multiple places that the tree-felling will be done in accordance with the Supreme Court orders and the Shekhar Singh report, it fails to note at least two key points of the Supreme Court order:

a) “All felling of trees... in national parks, sanctuaries, the tribal reserves and all other areas shall stand suspended”

and

b) “...there should first be compulsory afforestation/regeneration [and] the felling permissions would be based upon the extent of regeneration of forest undertaken and not the other way round.”

To now suggest that such massive tree-felling will take place in such a short time with no evidence of any afforestation or regeneration and that the timber will be burnt in power plants, leave alone the fact that part of land in Haryana has been handed over for quarrying, is a serious violation of the Supreme Court orders.

Planned projects and security concerns

Other new information now available in the letters exchanged between the MoPSW and the Andaman and Nicobar Administration raises additional questions of the initial planning, the cost estimates, and violation of due process. The ministry has now proposed a host of new projects, including an international cruise terminal to facilitate a “global port-led city” and accommodate high-end tourists, a ship-building and ship-repair facility, and an export-import (exim) port to help bring in construction material from neighbouring countries.

At first, in April 2024, Rajiv Kumar, Under-Secretary in the ministry (Sagarmala III), wrote to the Chief Secretary of the Andaman and Nicobar Administration asking for 100 acres of land with 500 m seafront for ship-repair and ship- building facilities in Campbell Bay, the administrative headquarters of GNI.

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This was followed by another request in May for details to enable Campbell Bay to be declared an exim port to import construction material. Then, Shipping Secretary T.K. Ramachandran himself wrote to the Secretary, MHA, in September advocating for an international and domestic cruise terminal as part of the project “to accommodate high-end and domestic tourists”.

Not only are these not part of the original proposal, they might not even be permissible under the law. The Andaman and Nicobar Administration and ANIIDCO have responded, arguing that ship-repair will not be compatible with the purpose of the greenfield township and it “could undermine the envisioned water front activities particularly the tourism infrastructure envisaged for GNI”.

It was also noted that the coastline came under the coastal regulation zone (CRZ 1a) as it has coral reefs along almost the entire east coast and that this would be a constraint for ship-repair activity as well.

Denial of information

What is also striking to note in this context is the position of the MHA and the consistent denial of any information by the MoEFCC.

In November 2022, Prasad Kale, a Mumbai-based researcher filed an RTI application seeking a range of information from the MoEFCC related to the forest and environment clearances granted to the project. But the MoEFCC refused to divulge the information, invoking issues of sovereignty, integrity, security, and strategic concerns of the country via Section 8(1)(a) of the RTI Act.

It also cited a submission made by the MHA (DO letter No. 15020/24/2020- Plg. Cell dated September 15, 2022) noting that the airport was a military-civil, dual-use airport and is supposed to be under the operational control of the Navy. This was also upheld by the Central Information Commissioner through its order of June 28, 2024, except for the directive to provide information on the compensatory afforestation proposed for the project.

Researchers have pointed to the incongruence of denying information on the entire project when only one component, the airport, had a defence connection.

The Shipping Ministry’s proposals also suggest that it is neither aware of the strategic concerns that have been used to deny information nor the fact that many of these activities, such as ship-building, a cruise terminal, and high-end international tourism, are themselves contrary to this strategic purpose. This is in addition to environmental impacts these new projects will have, the need for additional environmental clearances, and the possible cost implications.

Cost escalation

Considerable cost escalation is already being seen even without these new additions. This is most evident, for instance, in case of the transshipment port, which is at the heart of the entire project. The estimated cost of the port has already gone up from Rs.35,959 crore as mentioned in the project proposal in March 2021 to Rs.43,796 crore in the September 2024 letter written by the Joint Secretary of MoPSW to the Andaman and Nicobar Administration. This is already a 20 per cent escalation in less than three years, and no work has even begun on the ground.

A perusal of the history of this project, through articles published regularly in Frontline as well as in the recently curated The Great Nicobar Betrayal shows the casualness, apathy, and lack of rigour—whether in the quality of the environmental impact assessment process, concern for the rights of indigenous communities, the geological vulnerability of the place, or the cost escalations and their implications.

One striking example of this casualness and lack of rigour is the change in the position of key players involved in the project. One is AECOM India Ltd, a Gurugram-based consultant whose March 2021 pre-feasibility report laid out the contours of the project. This report gave a very positive evaluation of the economic and other benefits of the transshipment port at Galathea Bay and was the basis for the approval of the entire project.

For instance, the executive summary of the report notes: “The proposed port will allow Great Nicobar to participate in the regional and global maritime economy by becoming a major player in cargo transshipment.” It notes further that the locational advantage of being on international sea route will allow Great Nicobar to be “a sustainable, green, global destination for business, trade, and leisure”.

The same AECOM had a diametrically opposite view of the entire Andaman and Nicobar Islands just five years earlier in 2016. In its “Final Report for Sagarmala” prepared for the MoPSW and the Indian Ports Association, AECOM along with its consultant partner McKinsey was categorical that no site in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, including Great Nicobar, was good enough for a transshipment port. Its detailed technical note concluded the following, after evaluating many options:

“Development of FTWZ [free trade and warehousing zone] and transshipment hub may not be a favourable option due to the insufficient hinterland demand and supply.... Bunkering is also a non-starter... as Great Nicobar does not have any refining capacity of its own. Setting up of cruise facilities is the only feasible option that look promising at these islands as it will require minimal infrastructure and the exotic locations combined with many water-related activities makes it a favourite tourism destination.”

Intriguingly, there has been no explanation anywhere for this drastic change in stand and how a site that was completely inappropriate for a port and related facilities in 2016 suddenly became the most suited and viable for the same a mere five years later.

Changing stands

Equally, if not more, striking is the change in the position of Deepak Apte, a Mumbai-based marine biologist, who as chair of the MoEFCC’s expert appraisal committee, helmed the environmental and CRZ clearance for the project. He not only steered the clearance process within 15 months but also overlooked several key concerns.

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These included the fact that the project proponent has experience only in selling milk, liquor, and petroleum products; the shockingly poor quality of the environmental impact assessment report; the scientifically and ecologically unsound proposal for compensatory afforestation in Haryana; the failure to confirm the actual number of trees to be cut; the decision to hold a public hearing in January 2022 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic; and his role in heading a committee that laid down unscientific and unimplementable environmental conditions.

Just three years earlier, Apte had held a diametrically opposite position on the development projects for these islands in general and Great Nicobar in particular. As the incumbent director of the Bombay Natural History Society, Apte had penned a scathing editorial titled “Nicobar and Lakshadweep in peril” in the July-September 2018 issue of Hornbill, the society’s publication for its members.

He wrote: “The magnitude of infrastructural development envisaged for these (Andaman and Nicobar) Islands is not just scary but incomprehensible by any means.... If one browses through the recent documents of NITI Aayog ‘Incredible Islands of India (Holistic Development)’ one would be bewildered by the changes that are slated to take place in these extremely fragile ecosystems.... The most worrying project proposed is the trans-shipment project at Great Nicobar. The proposed site abuts Galathea Beach which is one of the best known nesting sites for Leatherback Turtle....

“While our mainland coastline has undergone tremendous transformation, developments now taking place along the most pristine seascapes of Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep will spell doom for these last remaining global marine biodiversity hotspots.... We hope wisdom will prevail and areas like Suheli, Little Andaman, Great Nicobar, Little Nicobar, Narcondam Island, and Interview Island will remain protected for their biodiversity and intrinsic ecological values as national assets and for the future prosperity of the nation” (emphasis added).

There is no evidence that anything changed in the material reality of these islands, their value, beauty, or vulnerability between 2018 when this editorial was written and in November 2022 when the very same project was granted all clearances by a committee he headed.

On the shifting sands of the coastline of Great Nicobar, these changing stands are killing one of the most valuable, precious, and irreplaceable treasures of this planet. No questions asked, no accountability demanded.

Pankaj Sekhsaria has written extensively on the environment, development, and wildlife conservation, with a special focus on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. His most recent book, in collaboration with Frontline, was The Great Nicobar Betrayal (2024).