Ignored by the ‘national media’, a disaster is unfolding in Great Nicobar

No term in Indian public discourse is as egregiously misleading as “national media”.

For the newspapers, magazines and TV channels that come under this rubric have a narrow, blinkered view of the nation they claim to represent. They see India from the National Capital Region, and often from the NCR alone. Their geographical proximity to power both seduces and satisfies them – hence the profusion of pontificatory pieces by cabinet ministers in the opinion pages of newspapers, and the reduction by television of the diversity and complexity of India into a shouting match among politicians of different parties.

Hence also the shrinkage of space in “national” newspapers, and the utter absence in “national” television, of detailed, ground-level investigations of life in different communities and in different parts of the country.

My scepticism about the “national media” has grown steadily over the years. It was validated recently by two excellent compilations of articles on an unfolding national scandal of rather large proportions, a scandal that will certainly never be the subject of a debate in a well-appointed television studio in the NCR.

The scandal I refer to is the planned devastation of the Great Nicobar Island, which I have been reading about in a special issue of the Chennai-based Frontline magazine, dated March 3, and in a book curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria containing articles carried by independent websites and magazines published in different parts of India. The latter collection is called The Great Nicobar Betrayal and it carries the telling subtitle, “Pushing a Vulnerable Island Knowingly into Disaster”.

Sekhsaria himself has conducted research in the Andaman and Nicobar islands for many years and the contributors to the volume he has put together likewise have first-hand knowledge of the terrain as well.

The project of the Union government whose dangerous implications that these essays have laid bare carries the Orwellian name: “Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island”. With its costs currently pegged as Rs 80,000 crore (and certain to escalate), this envisages the building, on this fragile island, of a transshipment port, an international airport, and a township intended to accommodate several lakh migrants from the mainland.

With an estimated area of 910 sq km, Great Nicobar is the largest among the Nicobar group of islands, part of the archipelago known as “Andaman and Nicobar”. Notably, the island is located in a seismically volatile zone, which has experienced more than four hundred earthquakes in the past decade.

In 2004, Great Nicobar was devastated by a tsunami whose brunt was borne by the indigenous tribals of the island, several hundred of whom perished, with many others losing their homes.

The tsunami was unexpected and unanticipated. This new project, however, is a willed, planned assault by the government of India on the natural and cultural integrity of the island. The port will be constructed by destroying the nesting sites of the Giant Leatherback turtle and causing much other ecological damage besides. The township will lay waste to some 130 sq km of rich natural forest, containing in excess of 10 million trees.

The island has many rare, and often endemic, species of plants, insects, birds, animals and reptiles. These all now stand threatened, along with the natural habitats, both terrestrial and marine, that they presently inhabit.

Such are the ecological costs; meanwhile, the social costs include the marginalisation and further impoverishment of the indigenous inhabitants of the island, in gross violation of constitutional provisions protecting tribal communities. The current human population of the island is 8,500; it is set to increase 40-fold if the project goes full steam ahead. The impact on the island’s culture and environment of this demographic colonisation by the mainland will be colossal and irreversible.

In a recent essay, Ajay Saini and Anvita Abbi – two scholars with extensive field experience of the islands – write: “The Great Nicobar megaproject is not just an ecological catastrophe; it is a deliberate, egregious act of linguistic and cultural genocide, masquerading as development.”

In a moving piece in The Great Nicobar Betrayal, the conservationist, Manish Chandi, recalls his first visit to the island, back in the 1990s. He and his colleagues met the brilliant ornithologist, Ravi Sankaran, who was then conducting his landmark studies on the Nicobar megapode, before dying tragically young. Sankaran told the visitors that they must take permission from the head of each village before beginning their studies.

“Remember,” said Sankaran, “this is their land; their space and their rights matter more than ours.”

This wise counsel has been utterly disregarded by those executing this costly and destructive new project, a project imposed by New Delhi with no transparency, no accountability, and no consultation with the Indians most affected by it.

In social and ecological terms, this project will bring devastation in its wake. Nor can it be justified on economic grounds. In an article in Frontline tellingly titled “The numbers do not add up,” M Rajsekhar argues that the potential revenue stream from the port and from tourism is too meagre to make the project economically viable.

By sinking in so much money in building infrastructure, the Indian state will, in effect, be subsidising private corporate interests.

Reading these essays, I was struck by the culpability of public institutions mandated to protect ecology and promote sustainable development, and of those mandated to safeguard the rights of tribal communities as well.

The essays in the volume edited by Sekhsaria, as well as those in the special issue of Frontline, document in detail how the National Green Tribunal, the ministry of environment, forest and climate change, the Wildlife Institute of India, the NITI Aayog and the ministry of tribal affairs all hastily gave clearances without any careful or rigorous assessment of the facts on the ground.

Deeply disturbing too is the complicity of some once-reputed scientists. Sekhsaria quotes a former director of the Bombay Natural History Society, who, in a 2018 article, characterised the project as “most worrying” and predicted that, if implemented, “it will spell doom for these last remaining global marine biodiversity hotspots”.

The scientist urged that the project be put on hold so that islands like Great Nicobar “will remain protected for their biodiversity and intrinsic ecological values as national assets and for the future prosperity of the nation”. Some years later, when appointed chair of a government committee, the same scientist granted a project he had himself identified as disastrous the clearances it now asked for.

However, some younger scientists remain independent and clear-eyed. In a wide-ranging (and closely footnoted) analysis extending over twelve pages of Frontline, the ecologists Rohan Arthur and TR Shankar Raman document the rich biodiversity of the island and speak of the deep bonds between the tribal communities and their natural surroundings before showing up, as hollow and unviable, the schemes of “compensatory afforestation” and “restoration” of damaged coral reefs proposed by the project.

They insist, on the basis of their findings, that “it becomes our duty as a scientific community not to validate a planned ecological catastrophe with palliative fixes”.

In his Foreword to the collection edited by Sekhsaria, the country’s pre-eminent ecologist, Madhav Gadgil, writes: “It is a global experience that the ruling classes never act in the interests of the environment or of the common people. It is people’s movements that have always forced governments to uphold these vital interests.”

In this context, it is disturbing to note that the Great Nicobar project is being handled not by the ministry of shipping or of commerce but by the home ministry. This is to forestall further criticism of the project; indeed, it has become increasingly difficult for journalists to now visit the island. In an atmosphere of secrecy and repression, the documentation of the potentially disastrous consequences of an ill-conceived and costly project becomes even more vital.

The writers and scholars whose field studies have formed the basis of this article deserve our collective gratitude for bravely holding our rulers to account while simultaneously putting our ‘national media’ to shame.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.

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