The Great Nicobar Ecocide
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By Akhar, writing from Kolkata, India, on the western shore of the Bay of Bengal
I write from Kolkata, beside rising water. Here, cyclone seasons grow fiercer, tidal surges eat the Sundarban mangroves, and every erratic monsoon carries an immediate sense of the climate emergency. India ranks 176th of 180 in Yale's Environmental Performance Index (2024) and 6th on Germanwatch's Climate Risk Index (2025). Across India, 2026 is already becoming a year of furnace-cities: Kolkata’s “real-feel” temperature has neared 52°C, while deadly heatwaves spread across much of the country.
Yet 1,500 km away, India's present ruling dispensation is preparing to destroy one of the planet's last intact tropical rainforests. The island is Great Nicobar, where a ₹81,000-crore+ ($9.5 billion+) mega-project is currently underway. The official language for this project is ‘holistic development.’ The more accurate word is ecocide. Who benefits from this project? Neither indigenous communities nor the rainforest, coral reefs, and leatherback turtles stand to benefit. If one follows the concessions, the contracts, the clearances — one can find a structural pattern of collusion between state power and corporate interest.
Conceived by NITI Aayog (public policy think tank of Government of India) and implemented by Andaman & Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation Limited (ANIIDCO), the project received environmental clearance in November 2022. In February 2026, India’s National Green Tribunal (NGT) upheld it, citing "adequate safeguards" and "strategic importance" — words Jairam Ramesh (from the political opposition) rightly called cover for consequences the clearance does nothing to address. The same apparatus that proposed this project granted its approvals. The "strategic" framing — an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" against China's Indian Ocean presence, 1,500 km from the Malacca Strait — demands interrogation: is militarising a Biosphere Reserve the only response to Beijing? Or is the narrative of “national security” merely a cover for handing ecologically priceless terrains to favoured corporate players?
What They Are Building — and What They Will Destroy
Project Great Nicobar: Components | Details |
International container port (Galathea Bay) | Phase 1 capacity: 4 million TEUs by 2028; ultimate capacity: 16 million TEUs/year |
Dual-use (civil-military) airpor | On one of India's last intact primary rainforest tracts |
Township | Projected population: up to 3,50,000 (from current ~8,500) |
Power plant (gas/solar) | Clearing additional coastal land |
Total project cost | ₹81,000–92,000 crore (~$10 billion) |
Forest land affected | 130+ sq km of 166 sq km project area |
Trees to be felled | Official: ~964,000. Independent estimates suggest the real figure could exceed 1 crore (10 million+) because dense primary rainforest in Great Nicobar may contain 400–900+ trees per hectare — far higher than the assumptions used in the official Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). |
Indigenous land diverted | 84.10 sq km of the proposed project area overlaps with officially designated Tribal Reserve land on Great Nicobar. |
Massive Deforestation. An Ocean of Loss. A Planet Betrayed.
Great Nicobar is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve containing Campbell Bay and Galathea national parks, harbouring species still unknown to science — the Great Nicobar crake remains formally undescribed as of 2026; Lycodon irwini, a new wolf snake, was named only in 2025. This is one of the last intact tracts of the Indo-Malayan tropical rainforest, home to high levels of endemism. Notable endemic and threatened species include the Nicobar megapode (Megapodius nicobariensis), Nicobar serpent-eagle, Nicobar parakeet, Nicobar tree shrew, and the potentially new Great Nicobar crake. Over 1,800 faunal species and 650 plant species have been recorded, with significant genetic diversity and endemism rates up to 24% in some groups. Many of these species exist nowhere else on our planet.
The carbon stakes are absent from mainstream debate. These primary rainforests are highly efficient carbon sinks. Independent scientific estimates suggest tropical rainforests in this region sequester roughly 5–12 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare annually. Clearing approximately 13,000 hectares would result in the permanent loss of 65,000–156,000 tonnes of annual CO₂ sequestration capacity. In addition, the one-time release of stored biomass carbon from felling up to 10 million trees could emit 7–20 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent — a massive pulse of emissions that directly contradicts India's Paris Agreement commitments.
Three further international obligations are being simultaneously shredded: the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (COP15, 2022) 30x30 target, which destroying a Biosphere Reserve makes a mockery of; UNESCO's obligations to its own designation, whose silence must be pressured; and UNDRIP — the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — which guarantees free, prior, and informed consent. Indigenous communities such as the Shompen have never given it. Under UNDRIP, no clearance is valid.
Galathea Bay is one of the northern Indian Ocean's most critical leatherback sea turtle nesting beaches. After the 2004 tsunami devastated nesting sites, leatherbacks took over a decade to return, the construction of a port ends that permanently. The government has proposed mitigation measures such as turtle translocation and seasonal construction restrictions. However, marine biologists and turtle experts argue that these measures are unproven and inadequate at this scale. Dredging, sedimentation, constant ship traffic, and habitat narrowing (reducing the bay mouth by up to 90%) will likely prevent leatherbacks from accessing nesting beaches altogether. Galathea Bay supports one of the most important remaining nesting populations of this critically endangered species in the region, and no credible mitigation plan can repair the permanent destruction of this habitat. Dredging will further destroy irreplaceable coral reef systems. Sedimentation, chemical runoff, constant shipping, and antifouling chemicals will devastate one of the most biodiverse marine zones in the northern Indian Ocean. No credible mitigation plan currently proposed addresses this scale of destruction. The government's so-called "compensatory" afforestation in the states of Haryana and Rajasthan scrubland is farcical: a coral reef cannot be “substituted” or “offset” elsewhere in that manner.
The Communities Who Survived the Tsunami — and May Not Survive This "Development"
On 26 December 2004, one of history's deadliest tsunamis struck the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Great Nicobar's tip sank 15 feet. Some indigenous communities such as the Shompen (consisting of 300-400 semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers) — lost almost no one: millennia of traditional ecological knowledge warned them beforehand. The territory of the Shompen extends to the mouth of Galathea Bay. The project would narrow the Galathea River by 90 percent, drown the pandanus groves that feed them, and force clans from ancestral land.
The Nicobarese community (~1,094 people), displaced by the 2004 tsunami and still seeking return, found their ancestral lands earmarked for the project. In January 2026, their leaders went public: they were being pressured to sign away territory. They said no. In February 2024, 39 genocide experts from 13 countries warned the UN that the population surge from 8,500 to 350,000 would expose the hitherto uncontacted Shompen to diseases — measles, influenza, respiratory infections — to which they have zero immunity: "a death sentence tantamount to genocide." A Shompen woman told Survival International: "Don't come into our forests and cut them down. This is where we collect food for our children and ourselves."
The Corporate Hand Behind the “Green” Clearances
In January 2023, the Ministry of Ports invited Expressions of Interest. Adani Ports (APSEZ) — operating 15 ports, handling ~27% of India's total port cargo — was among 11 bidders. No concessionaire has been formally announced. But to claim that no corporate beneficiary is implicated while clearances are being fast-tracked, legal objections overridden, and indigenous consent obtained through deeply contested and procedurally questionable processes strains credibility. ANIIDCO and the body granting indigenous consent are under the same administration. A Tribal Welfare officer who has never communicated with the Shompen in their language was designated to provide their consent. The Forest Rights Act in India explicitly forbids third-party representation for such Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). At every regulatory stage where independent institutions should have pushed back, they capitulated. On April 29, 2026, India’s Leader of the Opposition walked forests marked for clearance in Campbell Bay, called it "destruction dressed in development's language," and named the Adani Group, given the latter’s close proximity to the present Indian government. The BJP (at the helm of India’s ruling regime) accused him of links to China and George Soros. Readers may draw their own conclusions.
A Critical Fault Line
Great Nicobar sits in Seismic Zone V — India's highest earthquake risk. The 2004 epicentre was 80 km away. In July 2025, a geologist warned that earthquake clusters near the Nicobar arc could presage Andaman Sea volcanic activity. Prominent seismologist C.P. Rajendran has repeatedly cautioned against large-scale infrastructure in this region, highlighting the tectonic fragility, history of major subsidence during the 2004 event, and the presence of unknown tsunamigenic sources. The EIA has been widely criticised for downplaying long-term mega-quake and tsunami risks in one of the world’s most active seismic zones. No independent geological review has been commissioned. The resistance demands a moratorium on construction pending peer-reviewed seismic assessment by scientists with no project ties.
The Resistance, The Hope
Three Public Interest Litigations (PILs) in the Calcutta High Court — led by former IFS officer Meena Gupta — argue that not a single forest rights claim has been settled on Great Nicobar, voiding clearance under the Forest Rights Act, 2006. In May 2026, the court agreed to hear them, rejecting the government's dismissal bid. Relief sought: a stay on forest clearance until all Shompen and Nicobarese claims are properly adjudicated. Pankaj Sekhsaria's Island on Edge: The Great Nicobar Crisis (Westland, 2025) and The Great Nicobar Betrayal (Frontline, 2024) constitute the most thorough documented indictment of this project's failures across every dimension. Survival International, Kalpavriksh, the Coastal Conservation Foundation, and over 100 scientists and former civil servants hold the line. Manish Chandi (Wildlife Conservation Society, India) has asked one question: has the Environment Minister ever spoken to the Shompen or Nicobarese? The answer is no. Across Indian universities and Fridays for Future India chapters, young people are discovering Great Nicobar and refusing complicit silence. There is hope as long as there is active resistance.
A project that risks the destruction of an Indigenous people, devastates a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, eliminates one of the northern Indian Ocean’s last major leatherback nesting beaches, and could release millions of tonnes of CO₂ should not proceed. Neither military-industrial “strategic importance” nor cargo projections justify irreversible ecological collapse. The Calcutta High Court is still hearing the case. The Shompen woman is still speaking. The silence of the international community is not neutrality. It is complicity.
What Can You Do?
Follow and amplify: #SaveGreatNicobar · #SaveShompen · #StopNicobarEcocide
Demand accountability: Write to UNESCO. Write to the UN Human Rights Council. Ask your own government what it has said to India about Kunming-Montreal compliance.
Read and share: Survival International (survivalinternational.org/news/14313) · Kalpavriksh (kalpavriksh.org) · Mongabay India · The Wire · The India Forum · Time
Special Courtesy: Pankaj Sekhsaria (IIT Bombay) and Mia Castro (Survival International)