Island fault lines

Island on Edge is an enlightening and unsettling book that helps readers understand environmental decision-making processes, including who makes decisions, who benefits, and who bears the costs. It takes the reader far from comfort, exposing how power, land, law, and climate commitments intersect in the island of Great Nicobar, in particular, and why these intersections matter far beyond the archipelago itself.

One of the book’s most important contributions is showing how the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are not peripheral, but central to India’s political economy, development regimes, and climate commitments. The islands lie at a moment where these logics collide with unusual intensity. The processes described will be instantly recognisable to readers familiar with mainland struggles, where landscapes are systematically denotified, reclassified, and repurposed.

(For those unaware, the Great Nicobar Island Development Project is a Rs 72,000 crore mega-infrastructure initiative on the Great Nicobar Island covering nearly 16,600 hectares. It proposes, among other things, an international transhipment port, a greenfield airport, townships, and a gas-solar-powered plant. The project was conceived by NITI Aayog.) 

Reading the book alongside struggles against large infrastructure projects on the mainland, one cannot help but notice the scale of what is being proposed in Great Nicobar and the strikingly similar politics of it. The transhipment port, a greenfield airport, township, power infrastructure, and ecological re-engineering together resemble what might be called the mother of all projects. While many parts of the mainland have encountered and resisted these projects individually, here a fragile ecosystem is being overwhelmed by all of them at once.

A central thread running through the book is its dismantling of the idea that the islands are freely available lands. Again and again, the book draws attention to rich, largely intact forest ecosystems brimming with biodiversity, yet insufficiently studied, mapped, or understood. It quietly but powerfully warns that we are on the verge of irreversibly transforming landscapes without fully knowing what they contain. What stands to be lost may far exceed what is known, measured, or claimed to be compensated for.

The proposed ecological “mitigation” plans are exposed as tokenistic and deeply unscientific. They offer simplified fixes for complex ecological harm, as though loss can be neatly offset or explained away. The suggestion that coral reefs can be cut, relocated, and reassembled elsewhere reads almost like a comic turn in an otherwise grave narrative.

At times, the book reads like an ecological thriller. History, policy, and lived experiences are layered in a way that steadily builds unease, unfolding the decisions whose consequences are already perceptible. The book is gripping, as the risks are real, immediate, and irreversible.

A line from Chapter 11, “An Obit for Patai Takaru,” captures this sharply: “It is our submission that, as marvellous as these measures may sound, they constitute a plan that rivals Lysenkoism in its inspired ecological hubris…”

The failure of local governance in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as revealed in the book, is striking, despite nearly eight decades of independent India. The absence of basic infrastructure, such as schools, public health centres, reliable roads, and transport, is stark. It mirrors conditions in mainland regions, revealing a structural feature of governance that consistently ignores certain populations. Communities displaced by the 2004 tsunami, and those resettled by the state, including veterans, are once again marked for dispossession.

Past displacement, instead of greater protection, becomes a justification for further marginalisation.

The Shompen and Nicobarese tribal communities are being steadily pushed to the margins, even as ambitious “holistic development” plans disrupt their lands and lives. Their rights remain deeply undermined. New forms of control determine safety, welfare, and protection, reminding us that disasters reorganise power.

The book exposes the functioning of law not as a safeguard for justice, but as something eminently bendable. The issue is not the absence of legal frameworks, but how they are amended, reinterpreted, and implemented to favour predetermined outcomes. The environmental decision-making processes appear to be anchored less in precaution and justice than in investment priorities. There is a growing sophistication and opacity, as procedural compliance becomes a tick-box exercise, committees are compromised, and urgency and secrecy dominate, making challenges increasingly difficult. Ultimately, Island on Edge holds a mirror up to India’s climate commitments. At a time when centuries-old forests function as vital carbon sinks, their destruction is deeply contradictory. In a seismically active region with frequent earthquakes, massive investments and settlement of hundreds of thousands of people reflect a risky development.

It is a must-read, as the planet warms, and inaction will only bring us closer to the unfolding, irreversible harm already underway.