Planned misadventure being insensitively pushed through: Sonia Gandhi slams govt on Nicobar project

New Delhi: Terming the Great Nicobar infrastructure project a "planned misadventure", Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi on Monday said it poses an existential danger to the island's indigenous tribal communities and is being insensitively pushed through, making a "mockery of all legal and deliberative processes".

The collective conscience cannot, and must not, stay silent when the very survival of the Shompen and Nicobarese tribes is at stake, Gandhi said in an article published in The Hindu.

"Our commitment to future generations cannot permit this large-scale destruction of a most unique ecosystem. We must raise our voice against this travesty of justice and this betrayal of our national values," she said in her article titled 'The making of an ecological disaster in the Nicobar'.

Hitting out at the Modi government, the former Congress president said there has been no shortage of "half-baked and ill-conceived policymaking" in the last 11 years.

"The latest in this series of planned misadventures is the Great Nicobar mega-infrastructure project. The totally misplaced Rs 72,000 crore expenditure poses an existential danger to the island's indigenous tribal communities, threatens one of the world's most unique flora and fauna ecosystems and is highly susceptible to natural disasters," she said.

"Nevertheless, it is being insensitively pushed through, making a mockery of all legal and deliberative processes," Gandhi said.

She pointed out that the Great Nicobar Island is home to two indigenous communities, the Nicobarese tribe and the Shompen tribe, a particularly vulnerable tribal group.

"The ancestral villages of the Nicobarese tribals fall in the project's proposed land area. The Nicobarese were forced to evacuate their villages during the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. This project will now permanently displace this community, ending its dream of returning to its ancestral villages," she said.

"The Shompen face an even greater threat. The Island's Shompen Policy, notified by the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs, specifically requires the authorities to prioritise the tribe's welfare and 'integrity' when considering 'large-scale development proposals'.

"Instead, the project denotifies a significant part of the Shompen tribal reserve, destroys the forest ecosystems where the Shompen live, and will cause a large-scale influx of people and tourists on the island," she argued.

Ultimately, the Shompen will find themselves cut off from their ancestral lands and unable to sustain their social and economic existence, Gandhi said.

Yet, the government is stubbornly adamant and shockingly insistent, she added.

Gandhi alleged that the constitutional and statutory bodies set up to preserve tribal rights have been sidestepped throughout this process.

"As in Article 338-A of the Constitution, the Government should have consulted the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes. It has failed to do so.

"The Government should have consulted the Tribal Council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island. Instead, the Council Chairman's plea that the Nicobarese tribals be allowed to return to their ancestral villages has been neglected," she pointed out.

Gandhi further said that the letter of no objection was secured from the Council, but it has since been revoked, with the Council noting that the authorities had "rushed them" into signing the letter.

"Due process and regulatory safeguards set up to protect local communities have been evaded. The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) conducted as per the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 should have considered the Nicobarese and Shompen as stakeholders of the process and evaluated the project's impact on them," she said.

Instead, it omits any reference to them altogether, Gandhi said.

"The Forest Rights Act (2006), which empowers the Shompen as the authority to protect, preserve, regulate and manage the forests, should have underpinned any policy action. Instead, the Shompen have not been consulted on this issue -- a fact which the Tribal Council has now confirmed," she said in the article.

"The country's laws are being mocked wholesale. Unconscionably, one of the country's most vulnerable groups may have to pay the ultimate price for it," she asserted.

"Ecologically, this project is nothing short of an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. The project will require the cutting down of trees on an estimated 15 per cent of the island's land, decimating a nationally and globally unique rainforest ecosystem," she pointed out.

The Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change estimates that 8.5 lakh trees may be cut, Gandhi said.

"This is a depressing figure, but it may also be a gross underestimate - independent estimates have suggested that 32 lakh trees to 58 lakh trees may eventually be cut," she said.

The government's solution to this indiscriminate tree felling is that of "compensatory afforestation", a rather poor substitute for the loss of natural, old-growth forests, she opined.

"Despite abundant evidence confirming the same, which includes a National Green Tribunal order, the Government has contrived ways to manipulate this truth through a high-powered committee (HPC). The report of this HPC and the ground-truthing exercise it conducted to reclassify the port site out of CRZ 1A has not been made public," she said.

Gandhi further argued that from a wildlife standpoint too, the project raises serious concerns.

"Primatologists have written to the Government expressing grave concerns about the project's impact on the Nicobar long-tailed macaque. These concerns have been ignored," she said.

The biodiversity assessments for the projects have come under questioning for critical methodological flaws, Gandhi said.

"The assessment of sea turtle nesting sites was conducted in the off-season for nesting. Drones were employed to gauge the project's impact on dugongs, but these drones have limited capacity and can only assess shallow areas," she said.

Finally, the project, including the port, is coming up in a seismically sensitive earthquake-prone zone, she pointed out.

Locating such a massive project here deliberately jeopardises investment, infrastructure, people and the ecology, she added.

The project, titled 'Holistic Development of Great Nicobar', involves the construction of a transhipment port, an international airport, a township and a power plant spanning more than 160 sq km.