Legal Challenges In Great Nicobar Infra Project

INFRA PROJECT

The Central government’s Rs 72,000 cr-Great Nicobar Island (GNI) infrastructure project has also faced legal challenges in the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and the Calcutta High Court, which has jurisdiction over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

ABOUT GREAT NICOBAR ISLAND

• Great Nicobar is the southernmost and largest of the Nicobar Islands, a sparsely inhabited 910-sq-km patch of mainly tropical rainforest in southeastern Bay of Bengal.
• Indira Point on the island, India’s southernmost point, is only 90 nautical miles (less than 170 km) from Sabang at the northern tip of Sumatra, the largest island of the Indonesian archipelago.
• Great Nicobar has two national parks (Galathea Bay National Park and Campbell Bay National Park, a biosphere reserve (Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve.), small populations of the Shompen and Nicobarese tribal peoples, and a few thousand non-tribal settlers.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

• NITI Aayog has come up with a plan for the Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island.
  • Project implementation agency is the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation (ANIIDCO).
• Mega project includes:
• international container transshipment terminal (ICTT),
• a military-civil dual use airport,
• a solar power plant and
• an integrated township.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT

• Strategic Importance as it is in close proximity with South East Asia as well as SL. It will give a push to our Act East Policy.
• Enhanced Security as it will give us a base deep down the IOR. Maritime Piracy, terrorism, illegal trade & undue dominance of China can be tackled.
• It can create an economic trade hub in Andaman & Nicobar Island.
• It may promote tourism.
• It will also increase employment.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS

• The proposed infra upgrade has been opposed on grounds of the threat it poses to the ecology of the islands.
• The opposition — by wildlife conservation researchers, anthropologists, scholars, and civil society— has focused on the potentially devastating impact on the Shompen, a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG) of hunter-gatherers with an estimated population of a few hundred individuals who live in a tribal reserve on the island.
• It is feared that the port project will destroy coral reefs with spinoff effects on the local marine ecosystem, and pose a threat to the terrestrial Nicobar Megapode bird and leatherback turtles who nest in the Galathea Bay area.
• the proposed port is in a seismically volatile zone that saw permanent subsidence of about 15 ft during the 2004 tsunami.

THE MoEFCC ON THE PROJECT Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has granted environmental clearance for diversion of 130.75 sq. km of forest in Great Nicobar Island (GNI) for mega ₹72,000-crore multi-development projects. Key condition for the environmental clearance is the submission of a detailed scheme for compensatory afforestation, which is to be done on non-notified forest land.

THE APPEALS AGAINST THE PROJECT

In 2022, environmental activist Ashish Kothari and Mumbai-based non-profit Conservation Action Trust (CAT) challenged the environmental and Coastal Regulation Zone clearances granted to the GNI project. Along with the submission before the eastern bench of the NGT, CAT filed a separate appeal challenging the forest clearance. NGT formed a High Panel Committee (HPC) to look into the investigations.

THE GROUNDS FOR APPEAL

• The grounds for the appeals were similar, centred on irreversible damage that the project would cause to biodiversity, inadequate environmental impact studies and opacity in the clearance process.
• The appeals pointed out that GNI was a Biosphere Reserve, home to a “wide spectrum of ecosystems comprising wet evergreen forests”.
• Issues of inadequate assessment of the impact on Shompen and Nicobarese tribal communities and non-compliance with due process in granting statutory clearances were also flagged.
  • The Shompens are hunter-gatherers, while the Nicobarese people’s ancestral lands are likely to be affected by the project.

THE FINDINGS OF THE HPC Last week, conclusions of a high-powered committee (HPC) formed by NGT in 2023 to revisit the project’s green clearance were submitted in an affidavit to NGT’s Kolkata bench by the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Integrated Development Corporation Limited (ANIIDCO). ANIIDCO is the project’s implementing agency. The HPC concluded that the proposed transshipment port does not fall in the Island Coastal Regulation Zone-IA (ICRZ-IA), where ports are prohibited.

THE NGT RULING

• The special bench ruled it did not find any ground to interfere with the forest clearance.
• It said while the forest help tackle air pollution and climate change, development cannot be ignored.
• It added that there was hardly any development in GNI and there was a need not only for “economic development but also national security”.
• The bench said that while the environmental impact assessment procedure is mandatory, it does not follow that “hyper technical approach should be adopted ignoring ground realities about the need of the country for development and national security.”
• There were “unanswered deficiencies” on coral conservation, the port’s location in a prohibited area and limited baseline data collection. An HPC headed by the Secretary, MoEFCC, was thus formed and ordered to finalise a report within two months.