Since 2019, indigenous communities and experts have been consistently sounding the alarm over the Rs 81,800 crore Great Nicobar megaproject. Sonia Gandhi’s recent column, “The making of an ecological disaster in the Nicobar” (The Hindu, September 8), reiterates these concerns and thrusts this into political spotlight: “Our collective conscience cannot, and must not, stay silent when the very survival of the Shompen and Nicobarese tribes is at stake,” she writes. “We must raise our voice against this travesty of justice and this betrayal of our national values.”
The words are stirring. Yet, for those who have long studied how the state’s notion of development has systematically dispossessed the indigenous people of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, they ring hollow. To invoke “justice” and “collective conscience” now — after presiding over the very government that laid the groundwork for this megaproject — is not solidarity; it is political theatre.
The Great Nicobar megaproject threatens to devastate a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, tears through fragile ecosystems, and imperils two of India’s smallest indigenous groups — the Great Nicobarese and the Shompen, the latter enlisted as one of the country’s 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). Amid debates over its merits and risks, one crucial question remains unasked: How did indigenous lands become entangled in this megaproject in the first place?
Gandhi offers a hint: “The Nicobarese were forced to evacuate their villages during the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.” What she leaves unsaid is who orchestrated this displacement, and why. The answer points squarely to the UPA government, over which she wielded immense influence.
After the tsunami, six of Nicobar’s 12 inhabited islands — Trinket, Chowra, Bompoka, Little Nicobar, Kondul, and Pulomilo — were evacuated. Nearly 29,000 survivors, including around 20,000 Nicobarese, were herded into 118 relief camps across Car Nicobar, Nancowry, Kamorta, Katchal, Teressa, and Great Nicobar.
By mid-2005, they were confined to temporary tin shelters with rations and basic amenities. Their requests were modest — boats, tools, and support to return home and rebuild huts and coconut plantations. Instead, the government persuaded them to stay put, promising comprehensive rehabilitation.
Dependency replaced resilience. Relief soon morphed into control. Traditional leaders and tribal councils, the backbone of Nicobarese self-governance, were sidelined. Administrators handpicked younger, Hindi- and English-speaking men as village “captains” (leaders), many reduced to little more than government mouthpieces. Decision-making shifted decisively into the hands of officials.
What began as humanitarian aid slowly became a method to grab lands. Trinket, Bompoka, Kondul, and Pulomilo were declared uninhabitable, and their people were permanently relocated. The Nicobarese of Chowra resisted. From camps on Teressa, they built canoes, returned repeatedly to their island to clear debris, replant orchards, and rebuild homes. Eighteen months later, they sailed home with over 100 small canoes and 10 ceremonial ones crafted in exile.
The Great Nicobarese suffered the most due to this betrayal. Confined to makeshift camps in Rajiv Nagar, Campbell Bay — tellingly named after Rajiv Gandhi — they pleaded for years to return to their ancestral lands. The government ignored them, keeping them in limbo until their exile was declared permanent, rendering them internally displaced people on their own island. By 2011, they were resettled in government-built shelters at Rajiv Nagar, while their ancestral lands were quietly absorbed into state control under the guise of rehabilitation, laying the groundwork for the current regime to fold those very lands into the megaproject.
The tsunami, however, was not the beginning of the story of mega-dispossession in Great Nicobar. Long before the waves struck, the government had already set in motion a calculated demographic transformation of the island. In the late 1960s, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a plan was devised to settle around 2,000 ex-servicemen families on Great Nicobar in the interest of national security.
Between 1969 and 1980, 330 families were settled in seven villages, each allotted around 11 acres. To serve these settlements, two arterial roads —the 51-km North–South and the 43-km East–West — were carved through primaeval forests, rupturing fragile ecosystems that had sustained the Shompen for millennia.
The fallout was devastating. The Shompen were pushed off ancestral lands, their foraging grounds fragmented, their resource base diminished. Contact with outsiders left them exposed to alien diseases and vulnerable to exploitation. Once autonomous, the island’s first inhabitants were reduced to minorities on their own land, stripped of both territory and autonomy.
The demographic balance has tilted even further over time. According to the 2011 census, Great Nicobar is home to over 8,000 people, of whom only 898 are indigenous people (with the Shompen numbering just 254 in 2022). While the indigenes resist the megaproject, settler populations —enticed by promises of jobs and infrastructure in a remote periphery —champion it. Their sheer numbers drown out indigenous voices, leaving those most affected by so-called “development” the least heard.
This history matters because it lays bare the long arc of state complicity in the mega-dispossession of the Nicobar islanders. The Great Nicobar megaproject is no aberration; it is the culmination of decades of state-led settlement, displacement, and demographic engineering — all aimed at claiming, taming, and commodifying indigenous lands and resources. To ignore these processes is not mere historical amnesia — it is a deliberate erasure of state violence.
Across regimes and party lines, governments have treated the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as empty frontiers: To be secured, resettled, and rendered “productive.” If conscience is to mean anything to politicians, they must go beyond performative outrage.
True justice demands confronting uncomfortable truths, admitting bipartisan complicity, holding both the state and oneself accountable, and — above all — listening to the Shompen and Nicobarese, whose land, autonomy, voice, and dignity have been systematically stripped in the name of development.
The writer is an anthropologist who worked extensively in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He teaches at the Centre for Rural Development and Technology, IIT Delhi
