Island on Edge questions the cost of Great Nicobar development push

The NGT's clearance for the Great Nicobar project highlights a widening gap between procedural environmental safeguards and the lived ecological and cultural costs on the ground

Island on Edge: The Great Nicobar Crisis

By Pankaj Sekhsaria

Published by Westland Books

262 pages ₹499

 

The National Green Tribunal’s (NGT’s) decision to quash a batch of petitions questioning the environmental clearance granted to the Great Nicobar Island Development Project exposes the gap between institutional definitions of environmental safeguards and the reality on the ground. 

While the NITI Aayog’s plan to construct a transshipment terminal, an airport, a power plant, and a new township has the blessings of the NGT, a collection of essays and interviews titled Island on Edge, edited by Pankaj Sekhsaria, interrogates the environmental ethics of the project. It urges readers to wake up and take notice of the massacre waiting to be set in motion, thanks to an anthropocentric mindset that views forests as an obstacle rather than a living ecosystem. 

In the titular essay of this collection, Mr Sekhsaria, an associate professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay’s Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas, who has written extensively about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, points out that “a massive 130 square kilometres of largely primary tropical rainforest” will be cleared to bring this project to fruition. Estimates about the number of trees that will be cut vary from 8,65,000 to 9,64,000 to 10 million. One wonders how a country that celebrates the Chipko movement, an eco-feminist revolution, can allow this potential ecocide. 

It is hard not to think of Gieve Patel’s poem “On Killing A Tree”, that staple of Indian school textbooks, while trying to wrap one’s head around these alarming statistics that frame deforestation as violence. Patel writes, “It takes much time to kill a tree,/ Not a simple jab of the knife/ Will do it. It has grown/ Slowly consuming the earth,/ Rising out of it, feeding/ Upon its crust, absorbing/ Years of sunlight, air, water,/ And out of its leprous hide/ Sprouting leaves.” 

Marine scientist Rohan Arthur and wildlife scientist T R Shankar Raman’s essay “An Obit for Patai Takaru” draws attention to the ideological tensions between environmentalism that is rooted in stewardship and resistance, and a bureaucratic green agenda that advances development priorities at the cost of climate goals. These scientists argue that the Environmental Impact Assessment “fails to recognize that deforestation of mature tropical rainforests can release as much as 650 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare, or over 4.3 million tonnes of CO2 by deforesting 6,599 hectares, which is equivalent to burning over 1.6 billion litres of diesel.” 

Also worth noting is their insistence that the forests have survived so far due to the traditional ownership and conservation of the Great Nicobarese, the original inhabitants who call their island “Patai Takaru”, and the Shompen, a tribal group with a population of around 250. 

“To ‘compensate’ for the environmental destruction, the government announced the creation of three sanctuaries for displaced leatherback turtles, corals and Nicobar megapodes on Little Nicobar, Meroe and Menchal Islands,” writes journalist Leesha K Nair, in her essay “20 Christmases After the Tsunami”. She punctures the jubilation around proposed sanctuaries as they are to be set up on the ancestral lands of tribals without any consultation with them. Her essay shows that a technocratic view of how environmental damage can be offset worsens the problem instead of finding a remedy. Apart from the soil, democracy gets eroded in the process. 

Ajay Saini, assistant professor at IIT Delhi’s Centre for Rural Development and Technology, deepens this conversation by spelling out the ecological wisdom that lies at the heart of how the Nicobarese relate to their surroundings. Mr Saini, an anthropologist working in the region, notes, “To the Nicobarese, nature is not to be tamed or exploited. As a sentient, interconnected being, it listens, watches and responds.” This is not to be dismissed as a folk belief, but welcomed as an ontological framework to reflect on how shallow the modern understanding of sustainability is. 

That said, academics and activists need to acknowledge India’s strategic interest in the islands. In an interview included in this book, Admiral Arun Prakash, former Navy chief and former head of the joint command of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, says that the danger of China occupying these islands is far-fetched. “The nearest 

Chinese naval base, in Hainan, is about 3,000 miles away. Moreover, they’ve got many other problems at their doorstep that they need to worry about; like Taiwan, for instance.” 

Going by our history, to underestimate China may not be in India’s best interest. It remains to be seen how India, which is reportedly investing close to ₹81,000 crore in this project, will secure itself as an international power, while also honouring environmental expertise and deep-rooted  cultural narratives that view nature as sacred. 

The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic.  Instagram/X: @chintanwriting