'The Great Nicobar Infra Projects Make a Mockery of Legal Processes': Sonia Gandhi

New Delhi: Despite the upcoming developmental projects in Great Nicobar being “the latest” in a “series of planned misadventures”, the mega infrastructure project is being “insensitively pushed through, making a mockery of all legal and deliberative processes”, Congress leader and Chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Committee Sonia Gandhi wrote in The Hindu. 

In Gandhi’s article, published in the national daily today (September 8), she highlighted the several reasons why the series of infrastructure projects being proposed by the current NDA-led union government in the southern part of the Great Nicobar Island – the southernmost island in the Nicobar island complex of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – are problematic.

She wrote:

“There has been no shortage of half-baked and ill-conceived policymaking in the last 11 years…The totally misplaced Rs. 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."

Ecologically, the project was “nothing short of an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe”, Gandhi wrote in her article. She cited independent estimates pegging the number of trees that will be cut down for the projects at between 32 and 58 lakh, and added that the compensatory afforestation recommended in lieu of this deforestation is being planned in Haryana, and that ironically, this land had been “auctioned off” by the Haryana government for mining.

Though conservationists have warned that the projects would affect endemic and rare wildlife including the Nicobar long-tailed macaque, their concerns have been ignored, Gandhi wrote; as has been the fact that the entire project is coming up on a “seismically sensitive earthquake prone zone”.

A primary concern is also the “uprooting” of indigenous tribal communities, she added, with Constitutional and statutory bodies set up to preserve tribal rights being “sidestepped throughout this process”. The government failed to consult the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and the Tribal Council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island, she said. 

“Due process and regulatory safeguards set up to protect local communities have been evaded,” Gandhi wrote, adding that 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. However, it omitted any reference to them altogether, she noted. 

Gandhi noted:

“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."

She wrote:

“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."

Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Gandhi’s son Rahul Gandhi had written to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs last week saying that he was informed of violations pertaining to the Forest Rights Act during the granting of clearances by the union government for the Nicobar projects. 

“I am writing to express my deep concerns regarding the violation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in the grant of clearances for the Great Nicobar Project. The Tribal Council of Little Nicobar and Great Nicobar has brought to my attention that the tribal communities, including the Nicobarese and the Shompens, were not properly consulted under the FRA,” Rahul Gandhi wrote in his letter to the union minister of tribal affairs, Jual Oram, on September 4.

Gandhi wrote to Oram that there were allegations that the No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the communities was obtained under duress with inadequate information, and that the council had subsequently withdrawn it upon learning about the details of the massive project.

“I urge you to examine the concerns raised by the Tribal Council and the local communities. Any development initiative must be grounded in our constitutional values of justice, equality, and respect for human dignity,” Gandhi had written in the letter.

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