In February 2021, India’s National Marine Turtle Action Plan mentioned Galathea Bay on the south-eastern coast of the Great Nicobar Island as one of the “Important Marine Turtle Habitats in India”. Beaches on either side of the Galathea River are the most important nesting sites in the northern Indian Ocean for the Leatherback turtle, the world’s largest marine turtle. The Action Plan says coastal development projects are major threats to turtle populations. But this kind of development is exactly what is planned for the future of Galathea Bay under the ₹72,000-crore mega project piloted by NITI Aayog for the “holistic development” of the Great Nicobar Island (GNI), situated at the southern end of the Andaman and Nicobar group of Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The giant Leatherback is not the only species dotting this ecologically and culturally rich Island spanning over a little more than 900 sq. km, of which 850 sq. km is designated as a tribal reserve under the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation, 1956. The Island has been home to two isolated and indigenous tribes — the Shompen and the Nicobaris — for thousands of years. The GNI was declared a biosphere reserve in 1989 and included in UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere Programme in 2013. It has an unparalleled array of microhabitats. These habitats host numerous species, including marine animals, reptiles, birds, mammals and amphibians. Several of these, like the Nicobari Megapode, are endemic to GNI and found nowhere else in the world.
This unique ecological setting faces significant and imminent alterations as the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) late last year cleared the decks for the mega project, which ecologists, anthropologists, domain experts, and former civil servants have called an impending ecological disaster. NITI Aayog, however, says its plan is aimed at tapping the “largely unexplored potential” of the Island.
The plan has four components — a ₹35,000 crore transshipment port at Galathea Bay, a dual-use military-civil international airport, a power plant, and a township, to be built over 30 years on more than 160 sq. km of land, of which 130 sq. km is primary forest. The northern end of the project falls in the biosphere reserve, which means a part of this protected region will have to be allotted to the project.
As for the population, the Shompen and the Nicobarese were the sole inhabitants of the island until the government set up seven revenue villages, settling 330 ex-servicemen families from 1969 to 1980. These three communities make up the over 8,000 population of southern Nicobar, which includes GNI, Little Nicobar, and other small islands. The mega project will bring nearly 400,000 people to GNI during its span of three decades. An estimated 8.5 lakh trees are to be cut down in GNI’s prehistoric rainforests.
For a project of this scale, size, and duration, the Great Nicobar plan has been accompanied by uncharacteristic haste in receiving various clearances. The plan was first floated at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation (ANIIDCO), based in Port Blair, was charged with implementing the project. In September of that year itself, NITI Aayog issued a request for proposal for preparing the master plan for the project. In March 2021, a little-known company, Gurugram-based AECOM India, released a 126-page pre-feasibility report for NITI Aayog. In October last year, it got stage-1 (in-principle) forest clearance, while the environmental clearance was given on November 11 by the Ministry.
The GNI lies between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in a tectonically sensitive zone. Researchers and NGOs from across the country have raised several concerns relating to the tectonic volatility and disaster vulnerability of the islands, which have experienced nearly 444 earthquakes in the past 10 years. The tribal communities, who were displaced in the 2004 Tsunami, are still recovering from its impact.
