In a film I saw some time ago, conservationist George B. Schaller longingly looks over the horizon at a vast expanse of desert in the Tibetan highlands teeming with herds of wild ass, musing that this is what must be preserved for future generations.
Pristine nature evokes dramatically diverse responses. Some are like Schaller and some are like the Indian government and its planning arm, NITI Aayog which has decided to torpedo the Great Nicobar Island, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, with ‘holistic development’ in the form of a transshipment port, an international airport, a power plant and a township over 130 sq km of forests with ‘unrivalled’ biodiversity.
Author Pankaj Sekhsaria is among the few who has consistently written on the constant threats to the little group of islands in the eastern Indian Ocean for three decades. This book of essays curated by him, addresses a monstrous perversion of planning and infrastructure development for public purpose in the name of developing the Great Nicobar Island. Even though the islands are not on top of public memory, unlike the more popular Andamans, there have been numerous forms of protest after the project was announced in 2020, and against the denotification in January 2021 of Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary and Megapode Wildlife Sanctuary as a protected area.
Pankaj Sekhsaria,
The Great Nicobar Betrayal,
Frontline publication (2024)
The Southernmost island in the Andaman and Nicobar group are home to the 250 Shompen and the Great Nicobarese who suffered heavily in the 2004 killer tsunami that destroyed large parts of the islands. The project will increase the population of the island from 8,500 to over 3,50,000. Almost very article in the book is written by those who know Nicobar and its fabulous natural wealth, which includes the fact that it is the nesting ground of the giant leatherback turtles which are a Schedule 1 species, a highly endangered status.
In his pithy introduction, Sekhsaria writes about the process of steamrolling approvals for the project which began with NITI Aayog’s request for proposals and the pre-feasibility report. The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report in 2021 provoked widespread horror and concern from all over the country relating to locating a project in a highly seismic zone, disregarding the rights of indigenous communities and other critical reasons on why the port project should not be located there.
However, the Teflon-coated ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEF and CC), impervious to these protests and grave concerns of environmental destruction and loss of biodiversity, approved the project in November 2022, which could prove to be a death sentence for the unique island and its small indigenous community. Soon the ministry also granted stage 1 forest clearance in violation of all existing laws including the Forest Rights Act and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956.
In another chapter, Sekhsaria mentions that one of the conditions for the environment ministry’s clearance of the project is that nesting holes of endemic owls shall be identified, geotagged and these trees will be safeguarded. On a superficial level, this could pass off as minute concern for wildlife but Sekhsaria pokes a huge hole in the condition by juxtaposing it with the fact that of the 1.86 million trees on Nicobar island, over one million will be cut for this megaproject, and an area larger than Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National park will be deforested for this development. If no trees, then no owls can nest in them right? Or must we hope that they do in the ones that are not cut? Similarly precarious is the fate of the hundreds of leatherback turtles who travel 10,000 km to nest on the beaches of Galathea Bay, part of the wildlife sanctuary by the same name notified in 1997 to monitor turtles, as environmental researcher Shrishtee Bajpai points out. She makes an impassioned plea for the need to stand up for these gentle creatures who cannot approach the courts on their own.
While the environment and forest clearances were challenged in the National Green Tribunal (NGT), it decided not to interfere with the environment ministry’s decision approving the project, or examine the case on merits as lawyer and activist, Norma Alvares, and journalist, Aathira Perinchery, discuss in their articles. In the case of four appeals, three against the environment clearance and one challenging forest clearance, the tribunal endorsed the project’s potential to bridge the infrastructure gap in the island and also the boost international trade. Development, said the NGT ruling, cannot be totally ignored, even while forests are of great significance to tackle air pollution and climate change. The NGT relied on a long-standing mantra of justifying projects in the larger public interest, ruling that ‘every development activity is bound to have some adverse impact on [the] environment but if impact can be mitigated and advantages to society are greater, such projects have to be allowed in larger public interest’.
The lack of a mitigation plan and study was exposed in an Right To Information (RTI) query demanding to know the list of scientific studies and collaboration by the Wildlife Institute of India(WII), which had ratified the denotification of the Galathea Bay. WII had conducted no such studies of leatherbacks and, as Sekhsaria remarks, it had signed away Galathea for a port project it knew nothing about. The proposed port is located in an area with 44 earthquakes every year and Professor Janaki Andharia, Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and others point to a serious lacuna in the EIA which hasn’t conducted a risk assessment for the Rs 72,000 crore project.
Letters to the authorities warned of a grave risk to public investment in such an area without proper analysis, especially in the light of subsidence of four metres of the lighthouse on the high ground at Indira Point, the southernmost tip of the Great Nicobar Island, which is now surrounded by water after the undersea earthquake of 2004. Going ahead and building on a fault line and locating a port project in a well-defined seismic zone is reckless, Andharia warns.
Other articles evoke the unique experience of naturalists and anthropologists who have studied the Island, and raise ecological concerns and also the plight of the local communities. While the Shompen wish to remain undisturbed, the Great Nicobarese, displaced by the tsunami and were promised government rehabilitation, see little hope of returning to their lands. For the government, the deep ecological relationship of such communities with nature and their way of life is not a factor while approving such projects.
Uday Mondal, an islander from the North Andaman Islands, who has documented the flora and fauna and ‘experienced the magnificence’ of Great Nicobar, is distressed that he may never get to see a megapode as the construction of the project will destroy 30 of the 51 megapode nests. In addition, he points out that Galathea Bay and Indira Point come under areas listed under the Global Safety Net 2020, which, if protected, ‘can halt the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change’. There is concern for the fate of the Nicobar long-tailed macaques, which are also endangered, and the unscientific references to them in the EIA, which villainised them as pests, as researcher Ishika Ramakrishnan writes.
The question of public participation in such projects is discussed In the penultimate article by Ajay Saini who teaches at the Centre for Rural Development and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. With his experience of working with remote indigenous communities, he raises crucial questions of the rights to ancestral land of the communities and how they were promised by the government that their lands and resources will not be harmed. However, the Nicobarese found that they were lied to in the public hearing and the project would indeed swallow their ancestral lands, which was opposed by their elders.
Great Nicobar is inhabited by the Shompen and the Great Nicobarese who constitute about 8,367 people according to the 2011 census. The Shompen, around 245 in number, are classified as a ‘primitive vulnerable tribal group’ which survives on hunting, pig rearing and some horticulture. One third of the Great Nicobarese population perished in the tsunami and the surviving internally displaced, who were relocated to the Campbell Bay, have still not returned home despite many pleas to the government. Alienated from their land, a village elder in Saini’s article is quoted as saying, “We may seem alive but deep inside we are all dead.” The customary rights to their land has been disregarded by the government, and Saini points out that the government would do well to obey an ancient custom in the islands of asking the Shompen before cutting a tree.
In a detailed article on his exploration, herpetologist and conservation biologist, S. Harikrishnan, who studied the herpetofauna of the islands, asks that if a 1.5 metre snake and a small lizard could remain undiscovered in the “forests of Great Nicobar, how many such elusive species could be there? We may never know,” he rues, and with the proposed project set to clear the forests, the true magnitude of the loss cannot be measured.
The book includes annexures of various petitions to the authorities, the letter of the tribal council withdrawing the no objection certificate for diversion of the forest land for the project and other documents, as well as a timeline of the project. Overall, this slim volume packs a solid punch in enumerating legal issues and highlighting, both, the lack of studies and a ‘holistic’ understanding of the colossal and deleterious impact on the indigenous people and the ecology of the Great Nicobar project.
