On the Great Nicobar island, why the future is fearful

About five years ago, John returned to the land he had left behind. As monsoons receded in Great Nicobar at the start of November that year, he and many others from the Nicobarese tribe travelled to the west coast of the island, which is the southernmost landmass of India, part of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The journey took them about six hours: they travelled by road in vehicles, walked through dense rainforests and rowed boats part of the way. Once they reached the coast, they got to work – they dug holes about a foot deep in the coastal soil, and planted around 500 coconut trees.

Since then, they make the same journey twice or thrice a year, tending to the coconut trees, fishing for crab and prawns in the ocean, and plucking pandanus, or screw pine fruit. The tribe is deeply familiar with this place – it is where they were born and brought up, and also where many of them lost their loved ones in the 2004 tsunami.

John was 11 when the tsunami hit, triggered by a 9.8 magnitude earthquake whose epicentre was near the coast of Sumatra. He was away for his studies in Car Nicobar, an island around 270 km north of Great Nicobar. When he returned, he found that both his parents had been washed away, along with over 500 other residents of the village. Only nine people who were living in the village had survived, who at the time of the tsunami were on a boat returning from another village after singing Christmas carols.

As a temporary measure to support survivors, the government moved many Nicobarese to Campbell Bay – the administrative headquarters on the north-east of the island, more than 40 km away. Two resettlement sites sprung up – Rajiv Nagar and New Chingenh. The government provided survivors with wooden houses on stilts, with tin roofs and plywood flooring.

But memories of their original villages lingered. “I miss the place and the happiness of living there,” John said.

The Nicobarese have been demanding to be allowed to return to their original villages for the last two decades. But so far, they said, the administration has not granted them permission to do so.

Five years ago, they decided to start planting coconut trees as a way of re-establishing their connection with the land.

Now, however, they are anxious that they might lose their lands completely to an upcoming development project, which a former secretary to the island claimed could turn it into “an alternative to Hong Kong”.

The Rs 72,000-crore project, which will take up 166 sq km of the island’s 921 sq km area, has four components – an international container transshipment terminal, a power plant, a greenfield international airport and a new township. A 2021 pre-feasibility report states that the port will put the island on the map of the “east-west shipping route that links East Asian exports with the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, and Europe”, and that the airport will “attract international and national visitors” to “participate in sustainable tourism activity”. While the report is silent about this, among India’s security establishment, many see the project as one that can make the islands “the first line of offence against any attempt from the East to undermine India’s maritime security”.

As Gautam Mukhopadhaya, India’s ambassador to Myanmar from 2013 to 2016, explained: “The location of the island which is between the straits of Malacca, the southern tip of India and the western Indian Ocean gives it an obvious strategic significance in terms of trade and shipping lines of communication between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.”

“The question, however,” he added, “is whether the same role can be played by any other port without the huge financial and incalculable environmental costs that this entails.”

Indeed, the environmental costs of the project are staggering, many experts have pointed out.

Almost 80% of the land needed for the project is forest land. While the government estimates that almost a million trees will be cut for the port, a rainforest ecologist told me the number could be as high as ten million.

This includes loop-root and black mangroves near the coast and old-growth trees and ferns in the dense rainforests further inland. Many of the varieties of climbers and shrubs in these forests, including ferns and wild fruit trees, are endemic to the Greater Nicobar island.

Critics also accuse the government of covering up the threats that the project poses to the island’s rich animal and marine life. For instance, in January 2021, the environment ministry listed Galathea Bay, a wildlife sanctuary on the island, as an “important marine turtle habitat” and the “largest leatherback turtle nesting ground” in the country. Just six days later, however, the sanctuary was denotified to allow plans to develop the port in the bay to proceed.

Meanwhile, sociologists and anthropologists have warned of the harm that could come to the island’s indigenous tribes, particularly to the Shompen, who number less than 230. Largely uncontacted, the Shompen are primarily foragers who remain on the move in the forests of the island. “Wherever the forest is being cut, the Shompen will be impacted,” said an official who requested anonymity.

In August, the Congress member of parliament and former environment minister Jairam Ramesh argued that the Great Nicobar project could “potentially result in the genocide” of Shompen and that the social impact assessment conducted for the project “ignored the existence of the Shompen and the Nicobarese”.

In response, environment minister Bhupender Yadav claimed that the tribal population’s interests “will not be affected adversely”, and that the environmental and forest clearances were granted on the basis of “rigour of environmental scrutiny and after incorporating consequent safeguards”.

While these debates have unfolded on the mainland, voices from the island have been largely missing. In September, I travelled to Great Nicobar to speak to members of the island’s tribal community, as well as other residents and officials, to understand how they viewed the impending development.

I found that the tribal residents of the island are fearful of the disruptions that the proposed project will cause in their lives by taking over their ancestral lands. Of the island’s 920 sq km, 751 sq km, more than 80%, has been demarcated as a tribal reserve since 1956. Not only is the sale of this land barred, even entry into it is barred for people other than the tribes. All the villages inhabited by the Nicobarese and Shompen before the tsunami fall within the reserve.

The Nicobarese noted for instance, that according to a map published by Niti Aayog, a trunk road will run close to the land where they have planted coconuts. Parts of the same area have also been earmarked for “logistics” and “mixed residential use”. The site of the proposed international container transshipment terminal, meanwhile, is close to another old Nicobarese village called Chingenh, where Nicobarese residents no longer live, but which they visit regularly to tend to plantations.

The pre-feasibility report, however, merely states that “there are currently no residents on the proposed site” of the port.

“Just because a piece of land is unoccupied by the people, it does not necessarily mean that the government should acquire it under their name,” said John when I met him in the office of chairman of the tribal council in mid-September.

John spoke to us on the condition that we would refer to him by a pseudonym – he was fearful of criticising the government because his community depended on its support. This was the case with every other person we interviewed on the island, barring two local businessmen whose families migrated to Great Nicobar a few decades ago and now expect to profit from the project.

Scroll emailed the tribal welfare department of the Andaman and Nicobar administration, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation, the project’s implementing agency, the environment ministry and the Nicobar district administration. This story will be updated if any responses are received.

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As the ship docked at Campbell Bay at around 5 pm on a September evening after a 30-hour ride from Port Blair, I caught my first glimpse of Great Nicobar. The island may be the largest among the Nicobar islands, but its headquarters, as I discovered, is folded within a 3-km stretch of road running between the main jetty and a helipad.

Between these two are administrative and defence offices, the living quarters of their staffers, homes of migrant labour from Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Jharkhand and tsunami resettlement villages. A small market also lies along the road with shops for groceries, stationary and school uniforms, a bus station and a couple of eateries.

Rajiv Nagar, the resettlement village is situated close to the helipad, and the other, new Chingenh, situated about 7 km south-westwards, is a village amongst the forests, with the shoreline at a walking distance.

Like John, most other residents of these resettlement villages also miss their old homes. “We used to grow papaya, bananas, potatoes, and coconuts, and fish and cook octopus, crabs,” said a Nicobarese woman. “We used to go to the nearest town’s shop only to buy rice.” Depending on the quantity of produce they had, they would also sell some, particularly dry fish and crabs. As she talked, the long tailed macaque, a dark grey monkey endemic to only three Nicobar islands, chattered outside.

Now, John said, “Our children eat jam and bread before going to school, while we used to go to school with coconut or screw pine in our hand.”

The Nicobarese people I met explained that they were not vehemently opposed to the very idea of the project – rather, they were concerned that it would lead to them losing access to their traditional lands, to which they had deep connections.

The idea of losing the land is particularly worrying because they live in great economic uncertainty. At Campbell Bay today, some Nicobarese work on short-term contractual labour or “daily rated mazdoor”, as it is known locally. “It brings in just about enough money to run the household, but managing school fees and electricity bills becomes hard,” John said.

Sometimes, Nicobarese go to the beach to fish for sustenance. A strip of white beach, known as the B-Quarry beach, lines Campbell Bay, and is frequented by volleyball players and younger residents. On an early morning visit to B-Quarry, I spotted some fishermen with fishing rods on small wooden canoes, and some fishing nets spread out in the water. All of a sudden, a pod of dolphins leapt out of the water, making their characteristic diving movements. These mammals, however, have not found mention in the final environmental impact assessment of the project.

From Campbell Bay, a road travels along the curved bay, connecting the headquarters to six other colonies of ex-servicemen, in consecutive sequence as one drives south.

As we continued driving towards the last such colony, we were welcomed by signboards marking “the south-most school of India” and the “south-most police station of India”, before we reached the top of a hill from where in the distance, a lighthouse could be seen – that was Indira Point, the southernmost point of India’s territory.

Below us was Galathea Bay, where the government proposes to set up the transshipment port. Such ports are designed to handle high volumes of goods, typically directing them through multiple modes of transport across the globe. The ships in the system are usually large, and therefore can only dock at ports that have a certain minimum depth.

The government claims that the Nicobar port will close a crucial infrastructure gap in India – so far, 75% of India’s transshipment cargo is handled outside of the country, in ports of Singapore, Colombo, and Klang in Malaysia, because most ports on India’s coast don’t have the required depth of 18 metres to accommodate large container vessels. Galathea Bay has a depth of 20 metres, and is therefore considered ideal for such a port.

But while the other two locations where the government is considering building transshipment ports – Visakhapatnam and Cochin – already have decades of established port infrastructure, Galathea Bay is currently just a stretch of sand. The day I visited, the driver refused to drive all the way to the bay because weeks of rainfall had left the roads impassable.

I had to remain content with viewing the bay from a distance, trying to visualise what I had read in an article Manish Chandi had written in The Great Nicobar Betrayal – an old Nicobarese settlement, Old Chingenh, comprising around 20 huts, used to be located not far from the bay. Even after being resettled in New Chingenh, about 40 km away, many Nicobarese travel to the old settlement to tend to coconut plantations.

The access to their traditional lands and villages gave them a sense of security for the future of their children, “in case they do not find jobs later”, said Mark, a Nicobarese resident of an island north of Great Nicobar. “We keep telling the administration we are okay with the project as long as they do not use our tribal land.”

Nicobarese I spoke to recounted that when around ten members from the tribe raised this concern at a public consultation meeting that the administration organised for the project in 2021, the administration assured them that the land they used would not be acquired. The following year, in August 2022, the chairman of the tribal council signed a no-objection certificate for the diversion of 130 sq km of forest on Great Nicobar.

However, three months later, the council withdrew this no-objection certificate. In a letter it wrote to the administration of the union territory and the environment ministry, its members stated that they were “shocked and distressed to learn” that 84 sq km of this land – including “parts of our pre-tsunami villages” – was to be acquired from the tribal reserve. The letter was published in a new book, The Great Nicobar Betrayal, curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria.

Mark explained, “In the public consultation meeting, they told us that they will do their best to ensure that none of the areas we use will be impacted. But later, when we saw the map with the proposed project developments, we saw that many of our areas will indeed be impacted. We then wrote to the officials but we have not heard back from them.”

In the final environmental impact assessment, Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation, stated that in lieu of the 84 sq km of tribal reserve land that it was denotifying, it planned to renotify 77 sq km, including land that fell in Campbell Bay National Park and Galathea National Park, as tribal reserve. Therefore, it argued, there would be a decrease of only 7 sq km of tribal reserve land as a result of the project.

But social scientists argue that the very foundation for the corporation’s actions is flawed. They note that under the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Act, 1956, if even a small portion of land in the tribal reserve is to be denotified, the process has to be consistent with the regulation’s preamble, which states that such denotification must be done in consultation with the affected tribal groups and for the “protection of the interests” of those tribal groups.

“Since the denotification order adversely affects the interests of both Shompen and Nicobarese, it violates the very foundation on which the Regulation draws its strength,” the group wrote to the tribal ministry in March this year.

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Members of tribal communities are also wary of plans to create new protected areas for wildlife on other islands, north of Great Nicobar, such as Meroe and Menchal islands.

The government is planning to notify land on these islands as protected areas in response to recommendations from the National Board for Wildlife. In January 2021, the board recommended the denotification of the 11 sq km Galathea Bay Sanctuary, in effect withdrawing protection from lands where leatherback turtles nested. The board recommended that the government develop a “mitigation plan” to ensure that “marine turtles continue to nest on the beaches near Galathea Bay during both construction as well as operational phases of the international shipment project”.

Accordingly, the expert appraisal committee, which recommends environment clearances, had in March 2022 announced plans to notify three new sanctuaries on islands around 30 km north of Great Nicobar. This included a new leatherback turtle sanctuary at Little Nicobar Island,a coral sanctuary in Meroe Island and one for the endemic bird megapode in Menchal Island.

But in fact, these islands have been used for years by Nicobarese. “These are the areas where our coconut plantations of many generations are,” said Mark. The tribe wrote to the district administration in July 2022, demanding a revocation of the three sanctuaries.

“The administration is unaware of our ownership systems and the traditions with which we manage the islands of Meroe and Menchal, and their importance to our community,” the letter stated. Referring to the presence of megapodes, saltwater crocodiles and leatherback sea turtles, they wrote, “we have coexisted with them long before the concept of a wildlife sanctuary was even conceived”.

Further, it noted, “We do not have a wildlife department within our community, but we have traditional rights, laws maintained and enforced by our elders, and also traditional practices due to which these species continue to persist and prosper on our islands.”

Their letter also referred to how “their customs around fishing have ensured a sustainable use of these resources”.

Mark described one such custom. Every family, he explained, would once in a while demarcate a certain area of the sea in the name of an ancestor, and as a sign of respect, no one would be allowed to fish there for a certain period, sometimes as long as a year or more. Only after the observation period was over – a day that was marked as one of celebration – would the community start fishing again in the restricted patch.

So far, the government has not responded to the tribe’s letters. An official from the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti, an autonomous government body formed to safeguard the interests of vulnerable tribal communities in the union territory, brushed these concerns aside and said that at the moment “the plan is very raw”, and that “while they attend all concerned meetings regarding the project”, the Samiti “does not have the granular information about exactly which lands would be impacted”.

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A drive through the main road that traverses across Great Nicobar allows a glimpse into its dense rainforests and the wildlife endemic to the islands, evolved over millions of years of isolation from other landmasses.

The driver of my taxi proceeded slowly to avoid disturbing the dark gray long-tailed macaques foraging on the trees along the road. A Nicobar tree-shrew scurried along grass by the side of the road on hearing the car.

These rainforests are significant resources for the Shompen tribe, which despite its miniscule numbers, has the largest footprint on the island. While the administration and most of the Nicobarese population currently resides in Campbell Bay, settlers from the mainland who were given land here between 1969 and 1980 are spread in a narrow belt along the east coast. It is the Shompen who move around and reside in the rest of the island, foraging for screw pine fruit, bananas and coconuts, and hunting wild pigs, eel and other fish for protein.

“As a semi-nomadic tribe, honey, edible roots, collecting the pandanus fruit is essential to them,” said Anstice Justin, former deputy director of the Anthropological Survey of India and a Nicobarese.

In many ways, the Shompen are even more vulnerable than the Nicobarese. Unlike the latter, the Shompen have mostly stayed uncontacted. They communicate in a language that only a few Nicobarese can translate.

In 2018, the NITI Aayog commissioned Dr Vishvajit Pandya, an anthropologist, to document the views of members of Great Nicobar’s tribal communities on a broad plan that was being considered to develop tourism in Great Nicobar. In a video report on the consultation, a Shompen tells the interpreters that “if you want to cut the forest, cut it on the coast”. He continues, “Do not climb our hills.”

The welfare of the Shompen community is supposed to be safeguarded by the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti. The executive council of the group includes the lieutenant governor of the islands, its chief conservator of forest and the chairman of the state social welfare advisory board. Under the rules that govern the body, individuals experienced in tribal affairs or a representative of any organisation could be “co-opted/invited” for “any particular meeting if need arises”.

The rules do not mandate any tribal representation. An official at Port Blair confirmed that no tribal member, including Nicobarese, is a permanent part of the council.

A research scholar who specialises on the interface between communities and the natural environment in the Nicobar islands explained that the Nicobarese have some representation, but only through individuals invited as casual labour, on short term contractual jobs, which the samiti refer to as “daily-rate mazdoor”.

Even though the body was responsible for the welfare of the Shompen, “they did not have any person in the samiti who could speak the Shompen language”, the researcher said. In 2012, after considerable discussion with the administration, for the first time a Nicobarese individual was included on a contractual basis to communicate between the council and the Shompen.

A decade ago, an advisory board to protect the Shompen drafted the Shompen Policy of 2015, which said that when large-scale development projects are implemented on the island, the community’s welfare “should be given priority and be reviewed in consultation with the AAJVS”.

The official at Port Blair insisted that the government’s decisions were in keeping with the policy. “We will 100% work with the Shompen Policy,” said the official. “The Shompens live very much inside the forest, and most likely, those forests will not be disturbed.”

However, in a letter written to the tribal ministry and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes in March 2024, anthropologists and researchers pointed out that the site of the designated power plant “overlaps with the area frequented by the Shompen of the Kirasis band and Buja Yae band in the forests of the Galathea river basin” who used it for “bonafide subsistence hunting and foraging”.

Justin argued that the project was “disrespecting” the Shompen’s culture. “How they look at the forest, worship the nature, their approach to nature is all guided by their beliefs and practices,” he said. By implementing the project without meaningfully consulting with them, “we will be imposing on the Shompen community who have no idea of such development as we understand it to be”, he added.

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It is not only tribal communities on Great Nicobar that are awaiting more information about the lands they are set to lose, but also settlers. “We are okay with the project, but the proponent and the administration needs to give us the reassurance that our livelihoods will continue to be maintained,” said Sita, the daughter of an ex-serviceman, requesting anonymity.

Families like Sita’s moved from different states in the mainland in four waves between 1969 and 1980 and were settled in seven colonies along the east coast of the island – Campbell Bay, Gandhinagar, Shastrinagar, Jogindernagar, Vijaynagar, Govindnagar and Laxminagar. Many of them grow coconut plantations. Some have also set up retail businesses, with shops and eateries in Campbell Bay.

Gandhinagar, which is Sita’s home, and Shastrinagar are the two colonies where the airport is expected to come up.

According to the draft social impact assessment report for the proposed airport, a total of about 800 hectares belonging to over 200 families from these two colonies will be required.

Sita said that her family will lose about an acre to the airport. This is part of the land that the government allocated to her family after most of their original 11 acres were submerged during the tsunami.

Sita said her family cleared forest twice and made the lands arable. “The first time we lost the land was due to nature, but this time, it’s man-made,” she said.

Settlers like her are demanding that they should get commercial rates for the land they are losing, and should also be provided with land as compensation. “We might be able to build another house with the compensation money,” Sita said, “lekin ghar se ajivika nahi chalti” – a house does not ensure livelihood.

Others are also demanding compensation for coconut plantations that they have reared over time and now stand to lose. “We are expecting the compensation for losing a coconut tree to be around Rs 5,000,” said ES Rajesh, punching numbers into a calculator in his office. “But if you would calculate the nuts an adult tree provides in its average 75-year lifetime, the cost would actually be around Rs 78,000.” Rajesh runs a truck business and is the owner of one of the only two coconut processing factories on the island. He is losing about 11 acres of his 40 acres in Gandhinagar to the upcoming airport.

Some settlers see the project as an entirely positive development. “With the port, my business will grow and I will be financially stronger,” said 39-year-old Satish Chaddha, an owner of a large multipurpose store in Campbell Bay, whose father moved to the island from Delhi. Six acres of Chaddha’s land is set to be acquired for the airport.

“With every development project, of course the employment would increase,” Rajesh said. “But whether it will be for the outsiders or insiders, we are yet to see.” He added that the education facilities on the island have not made the locals skilled enough to take on jobs that might arrive with the project.

He noted the example of Havelock from the Andaman group of islands, which is today a popular tourism destination. “Earlier, it only had farming done by locals,” he said. “Then, when bigger hotel groups came in, locals sold their lands and moved to Port Blair.” There, he said, these families sustained themselves as long as they had money from the sale of their land; afterwards, many were plunged into financial distress. “There will be many big players that will come in here too.”

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Towards the end of the week that I spent on the island, I saw long queues of two-wheelers line up in front of the only petrol pump on the island. It was the second time the island was witnessing a fuel crisis since April this year. Its stock of petrol had almost depleted, and it had begun rationing out the fuel it sold. The next supply of petrol was expected from a ship that was at the time waiting for favourable weather conditions at Car Nicobar, the district headquarters.

Islanders are naturally concerned about whether the island has the capacity to sustain large-scale development.

“During the summer months, the availability of drinking water is an issue,” said Andrew, another Nicobarese. “We get it once every three to four days. This is the problem when the population of the island is just about 8,000 people. How will they arrange water for all these people who would start living on the island during the construction and the completion of the project?”

In a meeting between the Nicobar administration and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation in October, it was decided that the Andaman Public Works Department would undertake field investigations and prepare a detailed project report for “augmentation of existing water sources” on the island starting in October.

Not everyone is convinced that improved infrastructure and connectivity will count as true progress. If the government was truly interested in developing the island, Andrew argued, it should have focused on improving its poor health and education facilities. Many students study in Great Nicobar up to Class 12, and then head out to either Car Nicobar or Port Blair for further studies.

Experts have other concerns pertaining to the island’s suitability for development. Professors from TISS, Mumbai, have analysed seismic activity in the region to show that the proposed container terminal would be located at a site that experiences “about 44 earthquakes every year”, which raises serious questions about the safety of the site and the massive public investment into a project on it.

Some, however, are happy about the opportunities the project will bring. “When the project comes, these issues will get sorted. Let us also have convenience!” Satish Chadda said. Chadda has applied for a licence to start a business selling filtered water, anticipating that the need for it will rise as more people start inhabiting the island.

He is also looking forward to improved connectivity to mainland India. He recounted that his wife could not reach her father’s funeral in Faridabad on time when he passed away some years ago.

A helicopter that can accommodate five passengers travels between the island and Port Blair, the closest airport, once a day on five days a week, while an Indian Air Force Dornier that can carry 15 people flies twice a week. Most residents rely on a weekly ship that travels between Campbell Bay and Port Blair, a journey that takes two days.

I had travelled to Campbell Bay by ship, but I left by the air force aircraft. As it took off around noon, I saw for the first time what Great Nicobar looked like from above, with its white sands and clusters of settlements, but most of all its vast expanses of forest. For a moment, I was transfixed. Then, I wondered how much of the forest would be left in the years to come, and how much of the landscape I had grown familiar with would change.