Strategic afterthought: On the Great Nicobar project

For a project so often invoked as a matter of national security strategy, the ballooning Great Nicobar Island development, now estimated to be at ₹91,000 crore, rests on a remarkably thin strategic record. The Centre has long cited the “strategic” character of its centrepiece — a transshipment port at Galathea Bay — to withhold information on its environmental clearances. Yet, the Public Investment Board (PIB), a Finance Ministry body, found in August 2024 that the port “lacked strategic objectives”. That label arrived only afterwards, from the Ministry of Defence and seems less like a founding rationale and more of an afterthought, retrofitted to a balance sheet. Both the PIB and the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) cleared the proposal, yet the PPPAC refused ₹12,230 crore in Viability Gap Funding, telling the Ports Ministry to find the money within its own budget — an unusual rebuke for a venture sold as nationally vital. If the port cannot stand on commercial returns, and if its real purpose is military, the case for a commercial transshipment hub dissolves.

Great Nicobar sits at the southern tip of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, wrapped in tropical rainforest and ringed by reefs of rare ecological value. The project — port, international airport, power plant and township — would clear vast tracts of that forest, much of it primary, and disturb the nesting beaches of the leatherback turtle and the habitat of the endemic Nicobar megapode. Scientists who have studied the island warn that the loss would be irreversible, and that no afforestation elsewhere can replace what is felled here. The island’s indigenous inhabitants have objections of their own, running alongside the ecological ones but not reducible to them. Tribal councils have said that consent was secured without full disclosure, and asked that ancestral land and the resettlement promised after the 2004 tsunami not be overridden by the project. Their criticism is not a refusal of all development. The quarrel is with scale, secrecy and sequence — a project conceived at a magnitude the island cannot absorb. The remedy is transparency. The Centre should release the High-Powered Committee report in full, account openly for the true cost to the public exchequer, and weigh it against an environmental loss that the exchequer can never reimburse. A project of this scale owes the country at least that much.