Nidhi Jamwal*
Festivities were in the air. The house was filled with flowers, twinkling lights, music, and the chatter and laughter of guests. A khansama (cook) and his companion were busy sending out endless rounds of chai and pakoras.
It was the precursor to the main wedding ceremony that was still three days away, on December 29, 2004, in New Delhi. And, the next few days would be unforgettable and not just because I was getting married.
On December 26, my household woke up to the news of an unmitigated disaster, a tsunami, an underwater earthquake that had struck off the coast of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean, at 7:59 AM local time. The horrific tsunami-led devastation slowly unfolded and sent shockwaves far and wide.
Its massive waves, some measuring up to meters, killed more than 280,000 people and affected another two million. As an environmental journalist, I wished to rush to ground zero, but I could not be absent at my wedding. So, in between the various ceremonies, I kept checking news updates which kept on getting worse.
It’s been almost 20 years since then, so why am I recalling these events now? What bearing do they have on our present and the future? The answer lies in a recent book, The Great Nicobar Betrayal, curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria and published by Frontline.
The 100-page book with essays from various writers, including Sekhsaria, details the devastation that is waiting to happen in the indigenous lands and pristine forests of the Great Nicobar Island, the southernmost and largest of Nicobar Islands.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands lay north of the epicentre of the earthquake on December 26, 2004. This archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean suffered great loss of forests and coastal biodiversity, and portions of its landmass were gobbled up by the ocean.
The islands are once again under threat, this one, brought about by wilful human actions. A Rs 72,000-crore project titled ‘Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island’, proposes to build a transshipment port, along with an international airport, a power plant, and a greenfield township spread over more than 130 square kilometers (sq km) of land after large swathes of pristine forests are cleared in the Great Nicobar Island, which is 910 sq km in area.
The book is divided into four broad sections — The history of the project, Ecological concerns, The tribal issue, and The legal angle. It lays bare the controversial project, which is being piloted by NITI Aayog and to be implemented by the Port Blair-based Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation.
It is likely that if the mega infrastructure project comes to fruition, it will unleash horrific disaster in one of the ecologically richest islands of the country, warn the various contributors in the book.
The Great Nicobar is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve with two national parks and has as many as 1,767 fauna and 811 flora species with an overall endemism of 16.96 percent. The land earmarked for the mega infrastructure project has over 1.86 million trees. About a million are earmarked for felling. Over 20,668 coral colonies will be affected, and the already small population of the Nicobar long-tailed macaque and leatherback turtles will dwindle further.
In her piece, The Great Nicobar macaques, Ishika Ramakrishna, one of the authors in the book, notes how in 2021, large swathes of land and coastal area in the island, including portions of the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve and Galathea Bay, were stripped of their protected status to make way for the massive project.
The Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary is one of the northern Indian Ocean’s largest nesting sites for leatherback turtles, which are known to migrate 10,000 kilometers between their foraging and nesting grounds.
However, the concerns around the project are not limited to the ecology of the Great Nicobar island alone. The rights of its two Indigenous communities — the Nicobarese (1,200 population) and the Shompen (245 population) — are being jeopardised too. The Shompen is a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG) that relies on hunting, foraging, and pig rearing, and has a heightened vulnerability as compared to other tribal groups.
The book notes that the cataclysmic tsunami of December 2004 ravaged Nicobar, claiming 3,449 lives, according to the official count (10,000 or around one-third of the Nicobarese community, as per independent researchers’ estimates). The majority of Nicobarese in Great Nicobar, who lived along the coasts in the south-east and south-west regions, were wiped out.
The government evacuated the surviving indigenes and relocated them in relief camps/ intermediate shelters at New Chingenh and Rajiv Nagar (Campbell Bay, Great Nicobar). Soon, the Nicobarese expressed their willingness to go back to their pre-tsunami villages. But the government kept them in these shelters for six years, writes Ajay Saini in his article, Whose land is it? in the book.
In 2011, against their wishes, the government allotted the Nicobarese permanent shelters at these sites, making them internally displaced people, he adds.
It is anybody’s guess what happens to the pre-tsunami ancestral lands that used to be inhabited by the Nicobarese and the Shompens! They are now seen as “vacant” lands that projects and outsiders can easily grab, warns Saini. Despite the pleas and petitions of the indigenous communities to be sent back to their ancestral villages, nothing has been done so far. Meanwhile, a mega development project is on its way.
It was on November 11, 2022 that the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change granted its final environmental clearance to the project. A large number of environmentalists, biologists, and wildlife opposed it tooth and nail. But, the government claims it has done an environmental impact assessment (EIA) study done and recommended a series of preventive measures to be undertaken to have the least adverse impact on the local ecology and indigenous communities.
But, Sekhsaria writes that “doublespeak runs through the full length of the environmental clearance granted”. For instance, he points out that the environment ministry’s “Forest Advisory Committee agreed to divert 130 sq km of primary forest on the condition that these forests would be compensated by tree plantation in the state of Haryana, more than 2,000 km away”.
According to the project proponent, the mega infrastructure is designed to promote “not only the economic development of the island and surrounding areas of strategic location but also for defence and national security”.
The book doesn’t disregard the fact that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have become a key strategic site, both commercially and militarily, for India. They are uniquely positioned to allow India to monitor the sea lanes in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans, writes Vaishna Roy, editor of Frontline.
But “the project is short-sighted and self-destructive. A small and self-contained scheme that does not threaten the ecology or the indigenous population but works towards inclusive growth would have been more fitting,” she writes.
One doesn’t need to be an environmental journalist or an ecologist to imagine all that could go wrong if a million trees from forests dating back to the Pleistocene period are cut down in an ecologically fragile island to pave the way for a transshipment port, international airport, power plant, and a township. There will be a huge jump in the population of the island that is home to marginalised and highly vulnerable indigenous communities.
Look around and you are likely to see/experience the fruits of this ‘development’ model — ‘smart’ cities that turn into swamps every monsoon, crumbling hills, landslides, rising heat, and flash floods. Climate scientists are warning that the worst is yet to come. We must learn to build with nature and not against it.
Often warnings are issued after a project has already taken off and construction is underway. The Great Nicobar Betrayal is a timely and detailed warning to avoid the apocalypse that the island is likely to get pushed into if the mega infrastructure project is implemented. It is high time the authorities wake up and read the writing on the wall.
*Nidhi Jamwal is a Mumbai-based journalist who reports on environment, climate, and rural issues. Her X handle is @JamwalNidhi
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