BOOK REVIEW: The Great Nicobar Betrayal

By Pankaj Sekhsaria, Frontline Books, Paperback, 100 pp. INR 499

By: Majid Maqbool

A man-made disaster is threatening to unfold on Great Nicobar island, one of the world’s last completely undeveloped areas, the southernmost and largest of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, north of Sumatra. This collection of essays curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria, who has written extensively on issues facing Andaman and Nicobar for the last three decades, paints a grim picture of the looming disaster from a mega development project which can potentially destroy this fragile island’s delicate rainforest ecosystem and its indigenous people.

The planned US$72 million mega development project, covering about 18 percent of the 910 sq km island, includes a transshipment port, airport, and a township spread over more than 130 sq km of pristine forest. The project seeks to increase the population of the island, declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, from the “current 8,000 people to 350,000 (a 4,000 percent increase) over the next 30 years and also envisages the cutting of nearly a million trees in a largely pristine and untouched ecosystem.”

The collection puts together 13 essays from different experts across publications, examining the proposed project in detail from all aspects including environmental, geological impact on the locally affected communities, legal violations, and due process of this disaster in the making. In addition to its unique biodiversity, the island is also home to one of the largest nesting population of leatherback sea turtles and endemic species like Nicobar megapode.

The little-known, remote island is again in the news after it made headlines during the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that hit it in December 2004.

“It is not even two decades since and it can only be considered Great Nicobar’s great betrayal and huge misfortune that this pristine island, its invaluable biodiversity, its original human inhabitants, the thousands of crores of investment, and the more than 300,000 non-islanders who might eventually live here are deliberately and knowingly being put in harm’s way,” Pankaj Sekhsaria writes in the introduction of the collection. “There cannot be a folly more monumental than this.”

Vaishna Roy, the editor of the Frontline publication, which has published the collection, notes in her editor’s note that the island is also sitting on seismological fault-lines and home to several rare and endemic species of flora and fauna. She wants the Indian people and government to sit up and pay heed to these concerns before embarking on such a mega project.

“If 350,000 people were to settle on this island, as the plan envisages, against the 8,000 who live there now, imagine the pressure on water and resources, on forest cover, and on the homelands of the Nicobarese and the Shompen who have lived here for millennia,” she writes in her editorial note to the collection, calling the colossal scale of the project “short-sighted and self-destructive.”

“A small and self-contained scheme that does not threaten the ecology or the indigene population but works towards inclusive growth would have been more fitting,” she suggests.

The book also highlights the condition of indigenous communities - the Nicobarese and Shompen tribes who have lived on the island for centuries and whose lives and rights are now threatened by this project. The mega development project also violates their tribal rights and consent which can further lead to their marginalization as they have also faced displacement post the 2004 tsunami.

Pankaj writes in one of his pieces in the collection that the Shompen tribe is classified a “particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG) and is a hunter-gatherer nomadic community, critically dependent on the forests of this island for survival.”

The essays in the book also underline the environmental regulations that have been flouted while giving a green signal to such a mega project with disastrous consequences for the island. This raises serious questions about accountability and governance failures when it comes to undertaking large scale developmental activities in ecologically fragile places like Andaman Nicobar. The book also raises concerns about the geological risks posed by such mega infrastructure projects in seismically active areas since the Great Nicobar was severely affected by the 2004 earthquake and tsunami.

The Great Nicobar Betrayal should set the alarm bells ringing about the impending disaster if the project goes ahead as planned. It's a wakeup call to reconsider how such reckless developmental projects can damage ecologically fragile regions and do an irreparable damage to their rich biodiversity and the indigenous rights of tribal people inhabiting these places.

The writers call for an urgent need to protect the Great Nicobar while advocating for a sustainable approach that balances development with ecological integrity and social justice. The collection is an urgent, essential reading for all policymakers, concerned government officials, and politicians in India who care about the environment and tribal rights. Will the concerned policymakers and government functionaries do a timely rethink of the idea of this reckless development project in order to avoid a man-made disaster from unfolding in the Great Nicobar remains to be seen.