Where Are Public Documents That Uphold Compliance With Clearances for Great Nicobar Project, Asks Jairam Ramesh

New Delhi: In yet another exchange of letters, senior Congress leader and former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh asked Bhupender Yadav, the current Union environment minister, that where are the public documents which are evidence of complying with several clearances accorded by the Ministry for the projects on Great Nicobar island. 

Ramesh’s letter to Yadav dated June 19 listed several discrepancies in the unavailability of public documents in this regard, and referred to Yadav’s responses to him in an earlier letter about this as being “evasive”, “disappointing” and “unsatisfactory”.

All issues addressed says Yadav

Ramesh, in a letter to Yadav on June 3, had raised several concerns about the environmental impact assessments undertaken to clear a slew of infrastructure projects on the Great Nicobar island in the Andaman and Nicobar island complex. Among these projects include an international transshipment container terminal, a township, a greenfield airport and a power plant.

Several sections of society have raised numerous concerns about these projects for the detrimental impacts it will have not just on the ecology and environment of the island (including felling up to a million rainforest trees) but also on the Nicobarese and Shompen indigenous communities who live on the island along with settlers from mainland India.

In a letter dated June 13, Yadav had responded that all concerns that Ramesh had raised had been already addressed in Yadav’s earlier communications. Yadav said that the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had considered and addressed several concerns about the project including the confidentiality of the report submitted by the High-Powered Committee.

Both in 2023 and 2026, the NGT declined to interfere in the clearances given by the ministry for the project but that it had directed that the conditions imposed for the clearances be strictly complied with.

“The Tribunal has also duly examined the Environmental, Forest and Coastal Regulation Zone Clearances in detail as also the environmental safeguards and the appropriate mitigation, monitoring and management measures,” Yadav had said in his June 13 letter to Ramesh.

In response, Ramesh called Yadav’s response “disappointing and unsatisfactory”, in his letter dated June 19. Ramesh said that environmental impact assessments covering different aspects of the Great Nicobar Island Project “are demonstrably inadequate and fall woefully short of guidelines” set by the union environment ministry itself. 

He pointed out five discrepancies in continuous monitoring mandated in this regard in his letter.

‘Where are the public documents?’

First was that though six-monthly compliance reports are to be made public, no such compliance report has been made available since March 2024. He added that minutes of the project monitoring committee meetings are being uploaded several months after they have been held.

Second, Ramesh pointed out that the environmental clearance calls for conservation and mitigation plans to be submitted within 15 days after the clearance was granted on November 11, 2022. These plans too are not publicly available, he said. These include the plans to be prepared by the Wildlife Institute of India, the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology, the Zoological Survey of India, the Botanical Survey of India, the National Institute of Oceanography, the Indian Institute of Forest Management and the Andaman and Nicobar Forest Department.

Third, some of these institutions had been asked to submit revised proposals for monitoring and mitigation plans after incorporating suggestions made by the Environmental Appraisal Committee, but these plans too are not publicly available, Ramesh said. 

“Moreover, it is strange, to say the least, that such plans may have been submitted after appraisal by the committee concerned raising doubts about their adequacy and reliability,” he commented.

Four, the updated Environment Management Plan based on existing and additional studies is not publicly available. 

Five, some studies proving that the environmental clearance “was granted prematurely and hastily” are still pending. Moreover, some of the mitigation plans, like the large-scale relocation of coral colonies are clearly unrealistic and almost impossible, Ramesh noted in his letter.

Does not come in way of ‘strategic objectives’

Ramesh repeated again that he has requested in the past that the report of the High-Powered Committee set up by the NGT be made public, along with the field survey of the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management which delved into the Coastal Regulation Zone status of the proposed transshipment port.

Making all these documents public does not come in the way of “fulfilling so-called strategic objectives which has now become the rationale for the Great Nicobar Island Project”, Ramesh added. 

“Serious questions on its environmental impact assessment and legitimate concerns on its grave ecological consequences remain unanswered and unaddressed by your sadly evasive replies. I am simply unable to understand the extraordinary level of non-transparency that is being adopted to hide reports, studies and plans,” Ramesh wrote in his letter.

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