Great Nicobar Mega-project: Major Highlights Of Sonia Gandhi's Article Calling It An Ecological Disaster

The Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi, while calling the BJP’s 11-year policy-making ill-conceived and half-baked, has penned down her thoughts about the Great Nicobar mega-project, calling it an ecological disaster. In her article entitled ‘The making of an ecological disaster in the Nicobar’ published in The Hindu, Ms. Gandhi has written about how the Rs 72,000 crore project is highly insensitive, making a mockery of the legal and deliberative processes.

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Major Highlights: ‘The making of an ecological disaster in the Nicobar’

• Sonia Gandhi has called the project an existential threat to the Island’s indigenous tribal communities and a threat to one of the world’s most unique flora and fauna ecosystems.
• The Great Nicobar Island is home to two indigenous communities, the Nicobarese tribe and the Shompen tribe (a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group). The project will permanently displace this community.
• The project denotifies a significant part of the Shompen tribal reserve, destroying the forest ecosystems where the Shompen live, causing a large-scale influx of people and tourists on the island.
• The project was cleared without consultation from the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and the Tribal Council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island. The Council Chairman’s pleas were neglected.
• The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) conducted under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, neglected the indigenous tribes.
• The project will cause falling of 15% in the trees on the island’s land. While some independent estimates suggest that 32 -58 lakh trees may be cut.
• The ‘compensatory afforestation’ can be no substitute for the destruction of multi-species, biodiversity-rich natural forests as has been seen in Haryana already.
• The planned port site also falls under the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ), which harbours turtle nesting sites and coral reefs. An attempt was made by the high-powered committee (HPC) to reclassify the port site out of the CRZ.
• The concerns of the project’s impact on the Nicobar long-tailed macaque have been ignored due to the methodological flaws. Also, the turtle nesting sites were surveyed during the off-season. Drones deployed to capture dugongs had only a shallow capacity.
• The port falls in a seismically sensitive earthquake-prone zone, as seen during the December 2004 Tsunami and earthquake in July 2025.

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