The Great Nicobar Project Is, After All, Not So Great.

Hello again!

Great to see you return to this week’s Politics to Policy edition. This week, we are going to talk about the Great Nicobar Islands Project, which has been at the centre of attention for almost all the wrong reasons. Let’s begin.

On February 16, 2026, the National Green Tribunal cleared the Rs 81,000 crore Great Nicobar Island Development Project. Citing "strategic and national importance," a six-member special bench found "no good ground to interfere." The clearances stood.

Four days earlier, a different NGT bench had delivered a notably contrasting observation: environmental violations are serious crimes against human life, equivalent to preventing homicides and assaults. The two rulings are separated by four days and issued by different benches of the same institution. Yet the larger separation is the operation of environmental governance in India when strategic interests are in play.

The Great Nicobar project has been moving through India's regulatory machinery since 2021. What it leaves behind at each stage is a case study in how large infrastructure projects generate approvals, how the frameworks meant to scrutinise them are managed and what happens to the communities and ecosystems in the path of that machinery.

The Great Nicobar Island sits at India's southernmost point, 90 kilometres from the western entrance to the Malacca Strait, through which an estimated 30% of all globally traded goods pass. The strategic logic behind the project is that India currently relies on Singapore and Colombo for container transhipment. A domestic hub at this location would reduce that dependence and extend India's naval and commercial reach in the Indo-Pacific.

The project as conceived involves an international container transhipment terminal at Galathea Bay, a dual-use civilian and military airport, a 450 MVA gas and solar power plant, and two new greenfield townships. The project area covers approximately 166 square kilometres, of which roughly 130 square kilometres is primary tropical rainforest. Clearing it requires felling close to a million trees. The island's current population of around 8,000 is projected to reach 3.36 lakh by 2055, a 4,000% increase, with a projected tourist inflow of one million per year.

The island itself is a biosphere reserve, declared as such in 1989 and included in UNESCO's Man and Biosphere Programme in 2013. It hosts two national parks, over 650 plant species, 71 bird species, and numerous endemic animals found nowhere else on earth: the Nicobar megapode, the leatherback turtle, the Nicobar crab-eating macaque and a species of crake that remains formally undescribed as of 2026. More than three-quarters of it is designated as a tribal reserve under the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Amendment Regulation.

The Environmental Impact Assessment for the project was conducted by a private consultant for a single season, rather than the three seasons mandated by regulation. The government's response to this discrepancy was that since there is "no high erosion site" in Andaman and Nicobar, three-season data was unnecessary. The NGT accepted this reasoning.

The EIA's treatment of seismic risk received sharper criticism from independent scientists. The island sits at the intersection of two active tectonic systems and lies close to the epicentre of the December 26, 2004 earthquake, which triggered a tsunami killing over 230,000 people. On the day the tsunami struck, Great Nicobar's southern tip sank by approximately 15 feet. The project's proposed port is located in this same coastal zone.

Scientists who reviewed the EIA noted that the document downplays earthquake recurrence risk despite the non-linear nature of seismic activity: decades can pass without a mega-quake, followed by a catastrophic event. The island also has local fault lines that make it, in the assessment of geologists, "an extremely geodynamic area" where major infrastructure projects carry particular vulnerability. In July 2025, a geologist warned that a cluster of smaller earthquakes near the Nicobar Islands could signal volcanic activity in the Andaman Sea.

A social ecologist who has spent over two decades studying the islands raised a related concern in June 2026. The soil beneath Great Nicobar's forests is geologically young and structurally weak on its own. Once the tree cover holding it together is cleared, it will erode and remain unstable, and the construction plans do not currently call for the deep foundations that instability would require.

The EIA acknowledges that the island "lies in close proximity to the Ring of Fire" and cites the 2004 tsunami as evidence of its exposure to disasters. Foolishly at best and dishonestly at worst, it then proceeds to recommend the construction of a major port and township on the same coastline.

The environmental clearance approved compensatory afforestation for the loss of close to a million trees in a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The afforestation would be carried out in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, approximately 2,600 kilometres from the Nicobar Islands.

A tropical rainforest ecosystem that has evolved over geological timescales, supporting endemic species found nowhere else on Earth, cannot be compensated for by planting trees in a climatically and ecologically unrelated zone thousands of kilometres away. The former civil servants who wrote to the President of India in January 2023 called this proposal farcical. The scientific community's assessment has been consistent: compensatory afforestation in far-field, ecologically incomparable areas addresses administrative requirements while providing no ecological equivalent.

The coral reef situation follows the same logic. The project area includes approximately 20,668 coral colonies, of which over 16,000 are under direct threat from construction activity. The government told the NGT it had plans to translocate these colonies. The scientific literature on coral translocation is clear on this: transplanted corals have low survival rates and remain susceptible to bleaching, particularly in the context of ongoing climate change-induced ocean warming. Coral reefs are long-evolved, highly specific ecosystems. Moving them produces neither the biodiversity nor the ecological function of the original.

The governance failure at the centre of this project is documented in the complaint filed by the Tribal Council of Little and Great Nicobar to Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram in July 2025.

The council, which is the apex representative body of the Nicobarese community, informed the minister that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration had made a false representation to the Centre. An August 2022 certificate issued by the Deputy Commissioner of Nicobar had certified that "the complete process for identification and settlement of rights under the Forest Rights Act has been carried out." The Tribal Council's letter stated plainly that the process of identification and settlement of rights under the FRA "has not even been initiated."

This matters constitutionally. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 requires Gram Sabha’s consent before forest land can be diverted. Without that process, the forest clearance granted for the project rests on a certificate that the representative body of the affected community describes as false. The Central government, as of September 2025, had sought a "factual report" from the Andaman & Nicobar administration on these allegations. The administration's response was to argue that it does not need to implement the FRA at all, claiming that tribal rights are already protected under the Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Act of 1956, which allows the administration to unilaterally divert forest land.

Members of the Tribal Council also reported in January 2026 that they had been orally asked by district administration officials to sign a "surrender certificate" giving up their ancestral lands at a meeting on January 7, without being told what the certificate contained or what it would mean for their rights.

The Shompen are among the most isolated communities on earth. Hunter-gatherers who have lived in the island's forests for over 30,000 years, they number approximately 250 to 300 people. They are classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. Most of their settlements have had no sustained contact with the outside world.

The April 2025 report by Survival International to the United Nations documented that the Shompen had never been asked for their Free Prior and Informed Consent for the project. Because most of their settlements remain uncontacted, the organisation noted that obtaining such consent would be "impossible." The Shompen's own communication about the project, where it has been recorded at all, is unambiguous. A Shompen woman quoted in the report said: "Don't come into our forests and cut them down. This is where we collect food for our children and ourselves. We don't want outsiders in our forests."

The project's proposed population increase, from 8,000 to over three lakhs, would bring an 8,000% demographic transformation to an island where a community of 300 people has minimal immunity to external diseases. In February 2024, 39 genocide experts from 13 countries had warned in a formal letter that the development "will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide." The threats identified extend beyond physical displacement: disease exposure, dependency on outsiders, alcoholism, sexual harassment and the destruction of foraging areas on which their subsistence depends.

The project violates multiple legal frameworks simultaneously. It violates ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through the absence of free, prior, and informed consent. It violates Article 21 of the Indian Constitution through the threat to life and health. It violates Article 338A (9) of the Constitution, which requires prior consultation with the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes. It violates the Forest Rights Act of 2006. It violates the government's own 2015 Shompen Policy, which states that the welfare and integrity of the Shompen must be prioritised in any large-scale development on the island.

The institutional response to these documented concerns followed a pattern that has become familiar in large infrastructure projects facing environmental and rights objections.

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which functions as a regulator of environmental policy, classified details of the environmental clearance process as non-public. The appraisal process, normally a public document, was withheld. Tribal minister Jual Oram told Parliament that no objections had been received from tribal councils or activists, despite the documented complaint from the Tribal Council of Little and Great Nicobar and a 2025 open letter from over 70 scholars, former bureaucrats, lawyers and environmentalists urging the minister to address the project's "grave and irreversible negative implications."

The NGT, after an earlier bench had constituted a high-powered committee to examine concerns about coral reefs, turtle nesting sites, and ecologically protected zones, ultimately disposed of the applications with a direction to ensure "full and strict compliance" with environmental clearance conditions. It found the strategic importance of the project sufficient grounds to let the clearances stand. The legal challenge to forest clearances remains before the Calcutta High Court. The Court rejected the Union government's objection in May 2026 that the lead petitioner, retired IAS officer and former Tribal Affairs secretary Meena Gupta, lacked standing because she lives in Hyderabad rather than the islands. A bench of Chief Justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Partha Sarathi Sen held that a project's scale or national importance does not place it outside judicial review, and that public interest litigation exists precisely to let vulnerable communities be represented by petitioners who are not themselves direct parties. The Court also allowed two connected petitions to proceed alongside the forest rights case, challenging the reduction of eco-sensitive buffer zones around Galathea and Campbell Bay National Parks, a second legal front the government did not have to contend with when the NGT ruled in February. The matter is listed for final hearing on June 23, 2026.

Even as that legal question sits unresolved, the project's execution has continued. The Centre cleared a separate Rs 13,000 crore dual-use airport at Chingen, near Galathea Bay, on June 8, 2026, replacing an earlier plan to expand the existing naval airstrip at INS Baaz. Lieutenant Governor D K Joshi told reporters on June 18 that the project was entering its "implementation phase," with the container terminal's first phase targeted to handle six million TEUs at a cost of Rs 20,000 crore within three years of the start of construction. Union minister Kiren Rijiju followed two days later with a public defence of the project's economic case. The clearance track and the construction track are now moving on separate, parallel timelines.

Political opposition to the project also resurfaced in this period. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi visited the islands on June 5, Environment Day, and challenged the government's defence rationale for the project, pointing to its commercial stakeholders. In public remarks during the visit, Gandhi cited a figure of 15 million trees being felled for the project. This number, however, does not match the close to one million trees recorded in the project's own environmental clearance documents, and neither side has reconciled the discrepancy. Four years into a clearance process built on official documentation, the most basic fact about the project's environmental cost remains a matter of public dispute.

The Great Nicobar project is unusual in scale. But the governance pattern it represents, false certification of rights settlement, compensatory afforestation in ecologically unrelated areas, single-season EIA for a multi-season ecosystem, strategic importance invoked to override environmental scrutiny, and pressure on tribal representative bodies to surrender ancestral lands, maps closely onto the history of large infrastructure projects in India going back decades.

Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and New Zealand have responded to this pattern of regulatory capture by adopting "earth jurisprudence": the legal recognition of rights of nature, granting rivers, forests and ecosystems the standing of rights-bearing subjects. India came briefly close to this approach in 2017, when the Uttarakhand High Court granted legal personhood to the Ganges, Yamuna and associated glaciers. The Supreme Court stayed the ruling. The idea of conferring guardianship responsibilities on behalf of natural entities remains available as a legal design tool. It has not been developed further.

What the Great Nicobar project demonstrates, across four years of documentation, is the chasm between India's formal environmental and tribal rights frameworks and their operational reality when strategic infrastructure is in the picture. The frameworks exist. The institutions empowered to enforce them exist. The only shift, when national importance is invoked, is the threshold at which those institutions choose to act.

A UNESCO biosphere reserve with 30,000 years of human habitation and endemic species found nowhere else on earth is being cleared for a port, airport and township. The compensatory afforestation will happen in Haryana. The coral colonies will be "translocated." The Shompen's consent was impossible to obtain and was therefore not sought.

The clearance machine moved through all of this and found "no good ground to interfere." The precedent is being set in stone.

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Anas Ahmad Tak