Site with least environmental impact not chosen for Great Nicobar project: Jairam Ramesh

He was responding to Yadav’s defence of the government’s environmental safeguards while pushing for the mega infrastructure project, which will involve the construction of a transhipment port, an airport, a power plant, and a township.

Ramesh stated that despite red flags raised in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the project site, Campbell Bay, the location with the least environmental impact, was not considered. Ramesh accused the EIA of seeming biased towards clearing the project as proposed by NITI Aayog.

Ramesh once again raised questions regarding the project’s impact on the tribal communities. “…direct displacement of the community is not the only threat to its existence. The project will require a large-scale influx of people and tourists, and the Shompen tribe may be ill-equipped to navigate this social contact. The population expansion will also inevitably generate ecological and resource pressures on the island’s land, forest, water resources, directly affecting the Shompen and Nicobarese tribals,” he said.

Additionally, he stated that the proposed project would legally displace the Great Nicobarese, whose ancestral villages were evacuated after the 2004 tsunami. “The project will foreclose any possibility of the community’s aspiration of returning to its ancestral villages and is, therefore, a permanent displacement for the Nicobarese tribals,” he said.

Ramesh stated that the ministry’s defence, claiming that due public consultations were held with tribal communities, failed to acknowledge that the chairman of the Tribal Council very clearly expressed their wish to return to their ancestral villages.

Ramesh termed Yadav’s claim that the project’s clearances withstood judicial scrutiny an “incomplete truth”. He said that the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had formed a high-powered committee to evaluate the clearances, and a temporary stay was placed on any irreversible project activity.

Ramesh questioned the NGT-appointed HPC’s conclusion that no part of the project fell in the Island Coastal Regulation Zone-IA area where port activity is prohibited. “The HPC’s original mandate, as per the NGT order cited previously, was to revisit the environment clearance given that the project falls in areas protected under ICRZ-IA. The HPC has been inventive by actually revisiting and modifying the nature of categorisation from IA to IB,” he said.

Ramesh added, “By definition, any areas that have corals, turtle nesting sites and ground-nesting birds are categorised as ICRZ-IA area. The HPC’s reclassification of land from ICRZ-IA to IB is very hard to believe – especially since the findings of the ground truthing exercise have not been made public.”

“I hope you will see the comments I have offered as a constructive contribution to the debate on a project which has far-reaching environmental and humanitarian consequences,” he said.