The Great Nicobar Island Project: A Misadventure and a Mockery of Legal and Deliberative Processes

• The Great Nicobar Island Project, a ₹72,000 crore expenditure, poses a threat to indigenous tribal communities, flora and fauna, and is highly susceptible to natural disasters.

• The project will permanently displace the Nicobarese tribe, whose ancestral villages fall in the proposed land area, and the Shompen tribe, whose Shompen Policy requires prioritizing their welfare.

• The project denotifies a significant part of the Shompen tribal reserve, destroys forest ecosystems, and causes a large-scale influx of people and tourists on the island.

• The Government has been insensitive in pushing through the project, making a mockery of all legal and deliberative processes.

• The project has sidestepped constitutional and statutory bodies set up to preserve tribal rights, including the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and the Tribal Council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island.

• The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) and the Forest Rights Act (2006) have been evaded, with the Shompen not being consulted on this issue.

• The project is an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, requiring the cutting down of trees on an estimated 15% of the island’s land, decimating a nationally and globally unique rainforest ecosystem.

• The government’s solution to this indiscriminate tree feeling is ‘compensatory afforestation’, a poor substitute for the loss of natural, old-growth forests.

• The planned port site is controversial, with some falling under the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) 1A, which is prohibited due to the presence of turtle nesting sites and coral reefs.

• The project raises serious concerns from a wildlife standpoint, with questions raised about the impact on the Nicobar long-tailed macaque and the biodiversity assessments.

• The project is located in a seismically sensitive earthquake prone zone, jeopardizing investment, infrastructure, people, and the ecology.

Nicobar Environmental Concerns is important topic for Civil service exam (WBCS).

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