No objections received on Nicobar infra project, says Minister; sent in 2022: Tribal council chief

“Nobody will get displaced, only 7.144 sq km of tribal reserve land will be used, rest is forest land… there are no objections, as he (Gokhale) is referring to, and the Gram Sabha has also agreed to it and passed it.”

On a video report about the Shompen and Nicobarese communities’ opposition, documented by Pandya who was part of the Andaman and Nicobar administration’s committee tasked with assessing the project, Oram said, “I do not have this video report of such opposition. If he can submit it, we will examine it.”

When contacted, Barnabas Manju, chairman, tribal council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island told The Indian Express that a letter revoking the council’s NOC and to forest diversion for the project was sent to Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Union Environment Ministry and Ministry of Home Affairs on November 22, 2022.

“Denotification of the tribal reserve will pose problems for us. We had sent the revocation letter to several ministries and had also pointed it out to then tribal affairs Arjun Munda during his visit to the island in May 2023,” he said.

In an April 12, 2024 letter to the Tribal Ministry and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST), which was probing a complaint on violation of tribal rights due to the project, Pandya, a distinguished professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, had pointed out his video was not taken on record by the island administration.

The tribal council had revoked its NOC to the denotification of 84.1 sq km of tribal reserve and diversion of 130.75 sq km of forests, alleging that it was done without seeking consent of indigenous inhabitants of the island and by concealing important information. The letter, dated November 22, 2022, also stated that crucial information regarding occupation of the ancestral lands was not revealed.

Gokhale had sought to know what action the Ministry of Tribal Affairs had taken on a letter of the tribal council, the impact of the project on the Shompen tribe and the Nicobarese Scheduled Tribe community, and their demand to return to their native lands where they forage and have plantations. He also sought to know whether Pandya’s video report was recorded by the committee.

Meanwhile, to Gokhale’s question on the action taken on the concerns raised by the National Green Tribunal and the NCST regarding the impact of the project on the local tribal communities, Oram said he cannot respond as the matter is

sub-judice.

Taking objection to this, Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said that as per a 21 July, 2023 ruling of the Rajya Sabha Chairman, only matters related to the conduct of a Supreme Court and High Court judge cannot be discussed under Article 121.

“I request that an answer be given at a subsequent date, because the Great Nicobar project is a recipe for environmental and humanitarian disaster,” he said.