Strategic afterthought: on the Great Nicobar project

For a task truthful often invoked arsenic a substance of nationalist information strategy, the ballooning Great Nicobar Island development, present estimated to beryllium astatine ₹91,000 crore, rests connected a remarkably bladed strategical record. The Centre has agelong cited the “strategic” quality of its centrepiece — a transshipment larboard astatine Galathea Bay — to withhold accusation connected its biology clearances. Yet, the Public Investment Board (PIB), a Finance Ministry body, recovered successful August 2024 that the larboard “lacked strategical objectives”. That statement arrived lone afterwards, from the Ministry of Defence and seems little similar a founding rationale and much of an afterthought, retrofitted to a equilibrium sheet. Both the PIB and the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) cleared the proposal, yet the PPPAC refused ₹12,230 crore successful Viability Gap Funding, telling the Ports Ministry to find the wealth wrong its ain fund — an antithetic rebuke for a task sold arsenic nationally vital. If the larboard cannot basal connected commercialized returns, and if its existent intent is military, the lawsuit for a commercialized transshipment hub dissolves.

Great Nicobar sits astatine the confederate extremity of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, wrapped successful tropical rainforest and ringed by reefs of uncommon ecological value. The task — port, planetary airport, powerfulness works and township — would wide immense tracts of that forest, overmuch of it primary, and disturb the nesting beaches of the leatherback turtle and the situation of the endemic Nicobar megapode. Scientists who person studied the land pass that the nonaccomplishment would beryllium irreversible, and that nary afforestation elsewhere tin regenerate what is felled here. The island’s indigenous inhabitants person objections of their own, moving alongside the ecological ones but not reducible to them. Tribal councils person said that consent was secured without afloat disclosure, and asked that ancestral onshore and the resettlement promised aft the 2004 tsunami not beryllium overridden by the project. Their disapproval is not a refusal of each development. The quarrel is with scale, secrecy and series — a task conceived astatine a magnitude the land cannot absorb. The remedy is transparency. The Centre should merchandise the High-Powered Committee study successful full, relationship openly for the existent outgo to the nationalist exchequer, and measurement it against an biology nonaccomplishment that the exchequer tin ne'er reimburse. A task of this standard owes the state astatine slightest that much.