To most of the world, Great Nicobar Island doesn’t seem to exist. Few photos from this remote, fragile island in the Indian Ocean have been posted online. The citizen science site iNaturalist contains no uploads about the island’s wildlife. The tourism site TripAdvisor only lists one restaurant on the island, with just two reviews. But India sees the potential for something huge on Great Nicobar: profits.
Great Nicobar is part of India’s Andaman & Nicobar archipelago, more than 800 miles away from the Indian subcontinent. The Indian government has spent the past several years pushing through a controversial $9 billion “holistic development project” for Great Nicobar — including an international port, an airport, a power plant, ecotourism hubs, and a residential township with entertainment zones, shopping complexes, and restaurants.
The project is a brainchild of, and being piloted by, India’s public policy think tank Niti Aayog, which was established in 2015 after the right-wing Narendra Modi government came to power. The execution of the project has been entrusted to a little-known government agency, Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation Limited, whose stated objective is to “develop and commercially exploit the natural resources for the balanced and environment friendly development of the territory.” The project comes under the purview of India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and is also supported by the port and Tribal affairs ministries.
The project, these entities argue, will transform this remote island into a world-class free trade zone like Hong Kong and usher in “development” for its people. At least 10 national and international corporations, including the Gautam Adani-led Adani Ports and the Dutch dredging major Royal Boskalis Westminister, have already expressed interest in the port project.
But environmentalists, ecologists, and conservation experts argue that the project, if allowed to go on as planned, will be “ecocide” and “genocide” for the island and its inhabitants, including hundreds of unique plant and animal species and two Indigenous communities. “In the past, successive governments had taken a hands-off approach to the Andaman & Nicobar because of its ecological fragility,” says Ritwick Dutta, environmental lawyer and cofounder of the advocacy group Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment. “That has now changed to an intervention-heavy approach that could not only change the ecological character of the islands but also put them at imminent risk.”
The Island
Great Nicobar is the southernmost of the 572 islands that form the Andaman & Nicobar archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean, where they sit closer to Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia than to mainland India. Over 95% of this island, the largest in the Nicobar chain, is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, within which there are two national parks: the Campbell Bay National Park and the Galathea National Park. Great Nicobar supports diverse habitats, including mangrove forests, littoral (beach) forests, coral reefs, and tropical evergreen forests.
That diversity, coupled with the island’s geographic isolation and tropical wet climate, supports an assemblage of at least 1,767 known animal species and 811 plant species. Of these, many — such as the Nicobar megapode, Nicobar long-tailed macaque, Nicobar scops owl, Nicobar serpent eagle, and Nicobar tree shrew — are endemic to the island and classified as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. In 1956 the government demarcated this entire island as a “Tribal reserve,” carving it out for the sole use of the Indigenous Shompen and Nicobarese peoples and prohibiting encroachment or use in any other form.
The nomadic forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer Shompens, with a surviving population of around 240, are recognized by the central government as a particularly vulnerable Tribal group. In February of 2024, 39 genocide experts warned that the project and its accompanying demographic shifts “will ensure the death knell of the Shompen,” who have thus far managed to limit their contact with the outside world. As a result, “simple contact between the Shompen — who have little to no immunity to infectious outside diseases — and those who come from elsewhere, is certain to result in a precipitous population collapse,” the experts wrote in an open letter to India’s President.
“We have met some families of Shompens living in Great Nicobar and none of them are interested in outsiders coming there and setting up shop or home or factories,” says social ecology researcher Manish Chandi, who has been working among Andaman & Nicobar’s Indigenous communities since 1995. “The southernmost family of the Shompens live close to the Indira Point, the southernmost tip of the island, and their territory extends to the mouth of the Galathea Bay, which is exactly where the port is slated to be constructed. So you can imagine a complete transformation of their lives,” he says.
The 1,094 Nicobarese live along the coasts and depend on fishing, hunting-gathering, pig and poultry rearing, and horticulture of coconut and areca nut. Displaced from their ancestral lands following the cataclysmic Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 2004, they have since been forced to live in government-provided shelters despite appeals to the local administration to be allowed to return.
“The Nicobarese want their ancestral lands back, if not to live, then at least to create their plantations,” Chandi says. “Even if we see it as ‘primitive’ or ‘rural,’ this is the life they have chosen and they want to continue with it to a great extent, of course with the addition of some modern facilities, such as medicine and education.” The island also supports a heterogenous settler community whose members have migrated to the Great Nicobar from India’s mainland states since the 1960s.
Great Nicobar has spent the past 20 years rebuilding from the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which claimed at least 3,449 lives (or as many as 10,000 according to some estimates), submerged parts of the coastline by nearly 13 feet, wiped out 27 square miles (6,915 hectares) of forestland, and caused widespread ecological destruction with lasting effects on the island’s biodiversity. It took over a decade for altered coastlines to re-form and mangroves and coral reefs to recover. The island is seismically volatile and has experienced 444 earthquakes over the past 10 years, or one earthquake a week, according to data compiled by researchers at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
India’s Playground
This ecologically fragile, biodiverse, and earthquake-prone zone is now the playground for the Indian government’s aspirations to create “an alternative to Hong Kong.” This massive development will require 64 square miles (166 square kilometers) of land, or roughly 18% of the total area of Great Nicobar. According to data provided by the environment ministry in Parliament, it will wipe out a million trees over 50 square miles (130.75 square kilometers) of pristine evergreen rainforests dating back to the Pleistocene era. Recent estimates by independent researchers suggest that the number may be as high as 10 million trees. The proposed port and parts of the airport and township will subsume the entire Galathea Bay on the island’s southeastern coast, leading to destruction of mangrove forests and coral reefs that create natural barriers against tsunamis and cyclones. The port will also claim 32 square miles (84 square kilometers) of Tribal reserve land, which constitutes half of the project’s designated land.
Protecting this Tribal land is crucial, Chandi notes, because most of the wildlife across the Andaman & Nicobar islands are found in the Tribal reserves. While there are nearly 100 wildlife sanctuaries and national parks across the island chain, most of them have a smaller complement of wildlife. As the largest protected ecosystems in the islands, Tribal reserves are important not only because they are home of the original inhabitants but also because they are crucial repositories of wildlife, he explains.
In addition, the areas adjoining the Galathea and Campbell Bay national parks will be left without any eco-sensitive zones to speak of. These zones are meant to provide an additional buffer or protection to the biodiversity within national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. In 2021 the environment ministry approved a proposal by Andaman & Nicobar administration officials to maintain a buffer zone of just 0 to 1 kilometer (0-0.6 miles) around these parks, meaning they may have no eco-sensitive zone around their boundaries. This is significant given that in a June 2022 order, India’s Supreme Court ruled that each national park and wildlife sanctuary must have a minimum eco-sensitive zone of at least 1 kilometer, though a year later the court relaxed its own order, saying such zones cannot be uniform across the country. “Having a zero-extent eco-sensitive zone sets a dangerous precedent, since such zones are created to prevent human-animal conflict,” says Dipak Anand, a senior project associate with the Wildlife Institute of India. Given that the Galathea National Park lies next to the Galathea Bay, it is also likely to experience the fallouts of construction and dredging activity as land is reclaimed for the port and the airport.
Finally, the environmental assessment report conducted for the project suggests that it will increase the island’s population from just over 8,500 today to 350,000 by 2052, placing huge pressure on its natural resources….