The Great Nicobar Debate: Prosperity, Sovereignty and the Future of an Ancient World

On a clear morning, the slow life on the isolated island of Great Nicobar seems untouched by the anxieties of the modern world. Rare species of trees tower over dense canopies in the tropical rainforests. The largest living turtles, the Leatherbacks, are nesting on secluded beaches. While saltwater crocodiles patrol the mangrove, coral reefs flourish in the deep turquoise waters. In one pocket, unique Nicobar Megapodes are prowling; deep inside the forest, indigenous tribes are out hunting.

Located at the southernmost tip of India, Great Nicobar is a treasure island. One of the country’s most ecologically rich regions, it has remained largely untouched due to its geographical location and distance from mainland India.

Despite its remoteness, the island is of great strategic importance to India. It lies barely 70 km from the Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. One-third of global trade, along with a significant share of the world’s energy shipments, passes through this narrow sea corridor connecting the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific. For decades, India suffered cargo losses as it was forced to disembark its ships at ports in Singapore and Colombo in the absence of a terminal at home.

But a larger issue requires the immediate attention of strategists. Geopolitical tensions are at their peak. War is the buzzword. The southernmost tip of the country deserves as much attention as the Himalayan borders. For decades, military planners have viewed Great Nicobar as a natural vantage point. Today, these two realities—geographical significance and geostrategic importance—have collided.

At the centre of this debate lies the Great Nicobar Project—an estimated Rs 90,000 crore flagship project cleared by the government. The project envisages a port, a greenfield airport, a township, power-generation facilities and supporting infrastructure that proponents say could transform India’s maritime and logistics capabilities while strengthening its position in the Indo-Pacific. Critics counter that the environmental costs could be irreversible, threatening fragile ecosystems, endangered wildlife and indigenous communities and would lead to large-scale deforestation and coastal alteration.

The debate has drawn in environmentalists, economists, strategic planners, tribal-rights advocates, politicians and policymakers.

“The Great Nicobar debate is not about choosing between development and the environment; it is about balancing both,” says Pratap Heblikar, emeritus visiting faculty at Rashtriya Raksha University. “India needs strategic infrastructure, energy security and economic growth. At the same time, the island’s forests, coral reefs and indigenous heritage are national assets that cannot be replaced,” he adds.

Imminent Dangers

In the summer of 2020, when people were forced to quarantine themselves following a nationwide lockdown imposed to fight the deadly coronavirus, a different kind of battle was taking shape on the Indo-China border, in the Galwan Valley of Ladakh.

Chinese troops crossed into Indian territory and established positions along a disputed stretch of the Line of Actual Control. What followed was perhaps the deadliest confrontation between Indian and Chinese soldiers in nearly half a century. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in a hand-to-hand clash that shattered decades of assumptions about status quo along the Himalayan frontier.

New Delhi responded swiftly by deploying troops, tanks and artillery in huge numbers. Economic restrictions followed, including a ban on several Chinese mobile apps and tighter scrutiny of Chinese investments. As the dust settled, Indian policymakers drew a larger lesson. Galwan was not an isolated incident. It came after the 2013 Depsang standoff, the 2014 Chumar episode and the 2017 Doklam crisis.

The pattern was becoming difficult to ignore. China’s growing economic power was increasingly being matched by a willingness to assert itself militarily. If it was already flexing its military muscle in the Himalayas and the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean would not be far behind in its scheme of things. With China expanding its presence across ports and seas in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), India urgently needed to shore up its position at key maritime chokepoints.

It was against this backdrop that India hurried to revive its strategic plans in the Great Nicobar Island. The government launched the project in 2021 and said it would substantially strengthen India’s presence in the Andaman Sea and Southeast Asia, enhance maritime and defence capabilities and integrate the island with global trade and logistics networks. The project received clearance from the environment ministry next year. Almost immediately, there was an uproar.

Who Pays the Cost?

In February 2024, a group of anthropologists, environmentalists and tribal-rights advocates wrote an extraordinary letter to President Droupadi Murmu. The proposed Great Nicobar mega-project, they warned, could amount to nothing less than the “genocide” of the Shompen, a reclusive hunter-gatherer tribe of around 300 people whose ancestors have lived in the island’s forests for centuries.

“The cumulative effect of these developments and the proposed demographic shift entailing 6,50,000 settlers, or an 8,000 per cent increase in population, will ensure the death knell of the Shompen. The result will be a collective psychic breakdown, leading to a devastating decline in the population,” the experts claimed. “But, even before then, simple contact between the Shompen—who have little to no immunity to infectious outside diseases—and those who come from elsewhere, is certain to result in a precipitous population collapse.”

The language was deliberately provocative. Genocide is not a word usually associated with ports, airports and economic development. Yet it captured the intensity of the battle unfolding over India’s southernmost island.

As protests by environmentalists against the project have gathered steam, many have started referring to the Great Nicobar as the ‘Lungs of India’ because of the presence of vast rainforests, rich mangroves, biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Spanning across one lakh hectares, the area was designated under Unesco’s Man and the Biosphere Programme in 2013. While forest area is about 85 per cent of the island, the area designated for the project is nearly 15 per cent of the thickly forested area, making it nearly a quarter of all the forest land diverted in the past three years across the country. Some flora and fauna are absolutely exclusive to the region and must not be touched, feel environmentalists. However, they believe environmental assessment for the project was treated as a procedural hurdle rather than an independent safeguard.

Take the coral reefs, for instance.

The coastlines of Nicobar are full of coral reefs that provide crucial breeding and feeding habitats for a quarter of all marine life. Official maps released in 2020-2021 showed reefs hugging the shores.

“By 2022, those reefs had simply disappeared from the maps and shifted offshore, conveniently clearing the way for port construction. Conservation specialists have pointed out that the new locations shown for the reefs are in waters too deep for coral to actually grow,” says Rajeev Gowda, chairman of the Congress Research Department (see page 30). The government has now identified four sites for translocating thousands of coral colonies.

The proposed port site at Galathea Bay is one of the most important nesting places worldwide for the endangered Leatherback Turtles who migrate more than 10,000 km to arrive here. Given the importance of both the species and the site, the Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary was notified in 1997. In 2021, it was denotified to make way for the port. It took the turtles nearly five years to return to the beaches of Nicobar after the 2004 tsunami. Construction activities will drive them away for good, say activists.

The project involves the felling of close to a million trees. The fact that compensatory afforestation is to be carried out hund­reds of kilometres away in Haryana has baffled environmentalists.

“The island lies close to the same fault line that triggered the 2004 tsunami and 40 to 45 earthquakes are recorded every year in this zone. The proposed port site at Galathea Bay subsided by nearly 15 feet during the 2004 event,” informs Gowda.

Despite the consistent backlash, the National Green Tribunal cleared the project in February by dismissing a batch of petitions, saying there was “no good ground to interfere” with the environmental clearance granted to the project. However, an online campaign demanding withdrawal of the project crossed two lakh signatories in May.

When it comes to tribal lives, it is not just the few hundred Shompen who are endangered. There are also the thousands of fishing-dependent Nicobarese who survive on the elegant ecosystem and maintain a distance from the outside world.

“The project is likely to have a profound impact on them. Even if large-scale displacement does not occur, the sheer influx of people, infrastructure and external resources can fundamentally alter the social and cultural landscape,” says Vishvajit Pandya, an academic and founder-director of the Andaman and Nicobar Tribal Research Institute.

The project is currently planned on roughly 16 per cent of the entire island. Half of the land overlaps with tribal reserve areas that the Shompen inhabit. Earlier, in 2022, the government de-notified a chunk of the island’s tribal reserve after obtaining a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the Tribal Council. The consent was withdrawn shortly after that. “We were made to sign the NOC in such a hurry, before we could even read it,” Tribal Council chairman Barnabas Manju said in a press meet. Tribal Council chiefs allege that in January this year, the administration asked them to surrender pieces of ancestral tribal land, as per a report in Mongabay, a conservation portal.

“Governments often announce such mega-development projects without adequately consulting the local communities who will be most affected by them,” says Pandya. “National security and commercial interests cannot become the sole justification for undertaking large infrastructure projects in ecologically and culturally sensitive regions without meaningful participation from indigenous populations,” he adds.

The Great Game

The tension between environmental preservation and strategic necessity is hardly unique to India.

The United States offers several examples. During the Cold War and after, Washington expanded military infrastructure in ecologically fragile regions such as Alaska and the Pacific. More recently, using energy independence and national security as a rallying cry, the Trump administration has taken key steps towards oil and gas drilling across millions of acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—a biodiverse expanse in northern Alaska. The argument has been that energy security and competition with rivals justify certain environmental costs.

China has pursued this logic on an even larger scale. Its extensive island-building campaign in the South China Sea transformed reefs and atolls into military outposts equipped with airstrips, ports and surveillance systems. Environmental groups and marine scientists have documented severe damage to coral ecosystems and fisheries. Beijing, however, has viewed these installations as essential for securing sea lanes, asserting territorial claims and projecting power across one of the world’s most important maritime corridors.

Russia’s approach to the Arctic follows a similar pattern. As melting ice opened new shipping routes and resource opportunities, Moscow invested heavily in ports, military bases and energy infrastructure across the region. Environmental concerns have frequently been subordinated to the strategic objective of controlling Arctic Sea routes and exploiting vast reserves of oil, gas and minerals.

Even Japan and Australia have expanded military facilities in environmentally sensitive coastal and island regions amid growing concerns over China’s rise. Across the world, major powers have repeatedly chosen to alter sensitive ecosystems when they believed national security, economic influence or geopolitical advantage was at stake.

At such a time, India can’t simply ignore its own geopolitical needs. “Nations across the Indo-Pacific are investing heavily in maritime capabilities and strategic infrastructure. India cannot afford to remain a passive observer,” says Tuhin Sinha, national spokesperson of the BJP (see page 28).

The Strait of Malacca is critical for China, which relies on the route for 80 per cent of its crude oil imports and two-thirds of its trade. Tensions involving Iran, the US and Israel have demonstrated that disruptions on a maritime passage can send shockwaves through the global energy markets. With Iran using its control of the Strait of Hormuz as leverage in diplomacy, in case of a future crisis, could the Strait of Malacca end up in a Hormuz-type point of leverage? 

It’s a hypothetical scenario. But India must be ready for any eventuality.

By coincidence or design, 2047 sits at the heart of two national ambitions. It is the target year for the completion of the Great Nicobar Project and the year India hopes to emerge as a develo­ped nation under the Viksit Bharat vision. The overlap makes the island more than an infrastructure project. It becomes a metaphor for the tugs of war that always accompany a nation’s rise.

Each development project brings forth the age-old debate of ecology versus economy. That tension forms the crux of this project as well. For a fast-growing India, it is yet again a clash of its developmental goals and democratic ideals.

And the world is watching.

This article appeared in Outlook's July 6th, 2026 issue titled 'The Great Nicobar Debate,' which looks at the pros and cons of developing the eco-sensitive Nicobar Island.