'Shifting Narratives': Jairam Ramesh Counters Rajnath Singh’s Claim That Great Nicobar Project is For Defence Purposes

New Delhi: The Great Nicobar project is very clearly commercial and not a defence project as Union defence minister Rajnath Singh, senior Congress leader and former environment minister Jairam Ramesh said on Saturday (July 25) in a letter to Singh. 

“Shifting narratives” are bulldozing the Great Nicobar project forward, he said, in a social media post in which he shared the letter. Ramesh was responding to Singh’s letter to him on July 17 that insisted that the project was of crucial strategic and defence importance.

A “strategically significant” project, says Singh

In response to Ramesh’s letters dated May 16 and June 12, Singh, in a letter to Ramesh on July 17, had said that the suggestion that India's strategic requirements can be adequately addressed by just expanding existing defence facilities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands reflected “an incomplete appreciation of the project and the nature of maritime security in the Indo-pacific”. 

According to Singh, the Project is a “strategically significant national initiative designed to safeguard both India's maritime and commercial interests in the Indo-Pacific”.

The project by virtue of its location in the proximity of vital Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) enhances India’s maritime domain awareness and adds to the country’s outreach. This is an advantage that other military stations such as INS Kohassa, INS Utkrosh or AFS Car Nicobar cannot provide, Singh wrote. He also repeated an argument that the Union government has used before – excessive environmental impacts – to justify why INS Baaz could not be expanded. Calling the environmental and tribal concerns raised against the Great Nicobar project “incorrect”, he claimed that the project had undergone “extensive scrutiny” as per all Indian laws and that the government has placed all statutory clearances and mitigation measures in the public domain. 

I had written to the Raksha Mantri on May 16, 2026 and June 12, 2026 on the Great Nicobar Island Project. He had replied on July 17, 2026. I have now responded to him.

The debate continues even as the ecological disaster of a project is kept getting bulldozed through with… pic.twitter.com/XuZGFObtCp

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) July 25, 2026

“Even the National Green Tribunal did not find any ground to interfere in the environmental clearances granted to the project while disposing off the batch of applications,” Singh wrote.

According to Singh, the government “remains committed to ensuring that critical national security interests are met as per the evolving threat perception dynamics while factoring in the need for sustainable developments of national power”.

Holes in Singh’s arguments

However, many important documents including the final report submitted by the High Powered Committee (HPC) to the Tribunal – which forms the basis of the Tribunal’s clean chit for the project – have not been made public, even though activists and conservationists have actively asked for it.

The Tribunal’s objectivity has also been called into question. An analysis by the Indian Express in February this year that examined 1,00,000 NGT orders between 2020 and 2025 found that in 80% of the cases, the Tribunal favoured appeals for clearances put forward by industrial developers. This is in stark contrast with previous years where data shows a more balanced approach where relief for both sides hovered between 18% and 31% (2016-2019), the report said.

Meanwhile, a former Navy chief Arun Prakash had said in 2024 that while Great Nicobar’s proximity to the Malacca Strait gives India a significant strategic advantage in the eastern Indian Ocean, India could bolster its presence in the area by expanding existing defence facilities such as INS Baaz and upgrading the natural harbour at Campbell Bay, while also using some of the smaller nearby islands if required, as Frontline has reported.

Defence requirements small part of project

In response to Singh’s letter dated July 17, Ramesh countered that half the budget for the entire Great Nicobar project is for the transshipment port at Galathea Bay – a port that, by definition, is a commercial enterprise. Official documents show that the Union Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways is expected to provide viability gap funding through its allocated budgetary resources for the port – a fact that “further reinforces the primary purpose and nature of the infrastructure proposed to be established”, Ramesh pointed out.

The second point made by Ramesh is that publicly available evidence suggested that the part of the Project that has a defence focus is the proposed dual-purpose airport – which requires just 5% of the 166 square kms of land sought for the entire Project, and just 10% of its entire budget.

“Therefore, to say that the entire Great Nicobar Island Project has strategic importance is clearly an exaggeration,” Ramesh wrote.

Project includes tourism, finance hubs

Third, the Draft Master Plan for the Great Nicobar Development Area, 2047 that was released recently includes a cruise tourism terminal to put the Great Nicobar Island on the global tourist network, and estimates tourist arrivals of one million annually. 

‘Family entertainment’ projects such as casinos, discotheques, theme parks, amusement parks and water parks are also to be part of this, and even a finance hub on the lines of the Busan International Finance Centre in South Korea and the Marina Bay Finance Centre in Singapore, Ramesh said, quoting from the Plan, adding that this “reads more like an ambitious real estate project and less like an investment of fundamental strategic value” as Singh repeatedly claimed.

Ramesh also countered Singh’s claims that the greenfield airport at Galathea Bay on the island would entail far lesser environmental, social and operational costs than an expansion of the existing INS Baaz at Campbell Bay, calling it “demonstrably incorrect and logically contradictory”. Ramesh had already written to Singh on May 16 on this point, highlighting how the airport will result in cutting down two forest-covered hills, the destruction of protected forest areas that are part of the territory of the Shompen tribal community and more.

Ramesh also commented on Singh’s statement about the National Green Tribunal (NGT) approving the project, calling the report of the High-Powered Committee set up by the NGT – on which its approval was based – a “secret contradicting and making a mockery of your claims of transparency”. The environment impact assessments on which the HPC based its findings “violate in letter and spirit the guidelines of that Ministry itself”, he commented, making the HPC’s report a “clearly dubious exercise”.

Ramesh also noted how senior and distinguished retired naval officers themselves have been questioning the defence reasoning for the Great Nicobar Island Project – officers with decades of experience including in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, per Ramesh.

“Finally, let me reiterate that the Great Nicobar Island Project is most fundamentally a commercial enterprise for which a strategic rationale is being invented and propagated to build a counter-narrative as evidence has mounted and has conclusively established that the Project will permanently destroy a unique ecosystem of extraordinarily rich biodiversity,” he wrote.

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