Pressure mounts on Indian government over “genocidal” Great Nicobar mega-project

© Anthropological Survey of India

Shompen band traversing a river on Great Nicobar Island.

Calls are growing for the Indian government to scrap its controversial Great Nicobar project after it suffered a series of setbacks in recent weeks.

They include:

• The Tribal Affairs Ministry has demanded answers from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands’ authorities after it emerged that they had wrongly claimed the project had the consent of the Indigenous peoples of the islands, whose lands are set to be devastated by it. This has been confirmed by the Great Nicobar Tribal Council.

• The main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, has come out strongly against the project, with both Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi and Congress Parliamentary Chair Sonia Gandhi raising serious concerns about its impact on the mostly uncontacted Shompen and the Nicobarese peoples.

• The estimated cost of the project has risen dramatically – the latest government estimates say it will now cost more than US $10 billion, compared to the 2020 figure of just over $1 billion. 

• A series of earthquakes in the region have underlined the warnings of seismologists and geologists that building a huge infrastructure project in one of the world’s most active seismic zones is a recipe for disaster.

• Last year 39 international genocide experts wrote to the Indian President, describing the mega-project as a "death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide". They called for the scheme to be immediately abandoned. 

Survival International’s Director Caroline Pearce said today: “With every passing week it’s becoming clearer that this project is a disaster waiting to happen – from every perspective. It’s a scandalous violation of international human rights law; it will be disastrous for the Shompen and Nicobarese people whose lives are at stake and whose livelihoods will be destroyed; its price tag is now astronomical; and it all stands every chance of coming crashing down when the next major earthquake strikes, as it inevitably will. The government must now abide by its own laws and scrap this ill-conceived project.” 

Editors’ note:

• The Indian government plans to transform Great Nicobar Island into the ‘Hong Kong of India'. The Great Nicobar project involves the creation of a mega-port; a city; an international airport; a power station; a military base; an industrial park; and tourism zones, spread over more than 244 square km of land, including 130 square km of rainforest. 
• Experts estimate that 10 million trees will be destroyed in the mega project’s creation. 
• The government claims it will offset the rainforest loss by planting trees in the scrublands of North India. Crocodiles and thousands of coral colonies would be translocated to other parts of the island.  
• The mega-project will take up around a third of the island – half of it within the official Tribal Reserve. 
• The project would create a massive population explosion. Currently an estimated 8,000 people live there. The government plans to settle up to 650,000 people under the scheme, a population the size of Las Vegas. In addition to the inherent problems of a sudden population rise, it would drastically increase the Shompen’s exposure to outside diseases for which they have no immunity, and which could wipe them out.
• The government plans to encourage 1 million tourists and others to visit the island every year. 

For more information on the Great Nicobar project and its effects on the Shompen and Nicobarese, see Survival’s 2025 report.