This article examines the Great Nicobar Project through the lens of competing narratives, tracing how the government’s vision of strategic ascendancy obscures a tragic underside of shifting deforestation estimates, inadequate compensatory afforestation and institutional capture. It argues that the National Green Tribunal, in weighing ecological questions against geopolitical ones, has effectively abandoned its proper jurisdiction, while the absence of embodied resistance on a remote island leaves the project’s opponents confined to paperwork rather than presence on contested ground, thereby concluding that neither the comic nor the tragic vision can yet claim final authority over the island’s fate.
Every large infrastructure project asks, from the moment it is announced, to be read in a particular way, and how a nation reads its own ambitions tells us nearly as much as the ambitions themselves. Great Nicobar proposes a transshipment port, two new townships and a greenfield airport, all on an island that has for most of its recorded history kept heavy machinery at bay. Its sponsors have narrated this as the dawn of an Indian Hormuz or Malacca, a correction long delayed, by which the country finally claims its share of trade that already passes a few dozen nautical miles from its own coast. It is this comic vision in which a remote biosphere becomes a gleaming city, a settlement of a few thousand becomes a township of three and a half lakh, and the wilderness is not lost but fulfilled. Whether this comic reading can survive contact with the facts of soil, sea and settlement is the question worth asking.
Our opening description already puts us in a difficulty, since it asks us to accept the government’s metaphor before we have even asked whether the metaphor holds. On one side sits what we might call casual judgment. This is the judgment that praises or condemns the project depending on which party happens to hold office, so that a visit by the Leader of the Opposition produces one verdict and a ministry press release produces the opposite one, neither owing much to the island itself. On the other side sits the slower and far less quotable work of actually reckoning with the thing, counting trees, measuring forest, tracing a clearance through tribunal and committee, asking what will be done with land that does not simply belong, in any straightforward sense, to the government proposing to develop it. The comic vision of Hormuz and Malacca tends to crowd this second kind of judgment out of public view. Not because the facts are hidden, since they sit openly enough in committee reports and parliamentary answers for anyone willing to read them, but because a strategic narrative, once it takes hold, makes those facts feel like a digression from the real subject.
The forest land approved for diversion in the project’s first stage comes to a little over a hundred and thirty square kilometres, of which roughly sixty-six are meant to be retained as green cover under the clearance's own terms. The number of trees expected to fall within what remains has travelled, across successive government statements, from eight and a half lakh up to nearly ten lakh and back down again to just over seven lakh. Each revision gets presented as a refinement rather than an admission, so the very instability of the figure becomes a kind of argument, though hardly the one its authors intend. A count that cannot settle on its own order of magnitude is not yet a measurement; it is an estimate wearing the costume of one, and a forest that has stood through several geological ages deserves a more patient arithmetic than a number that shifts with the political weather.
To offset this loss, the government has turned to an entirely different geography, proposing to plant trees across tens of thousands of hectares in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, much of it degraded scrub in the Aravalli range, on the reasoning that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands already hold more forest cover than the law demands and can therefore export their compensatory planting elsewhere. As policy, this reasoning is sound enough. As for ecology, it is false, because a tropical evergreen forest sheltering several hundred species found nowhere else on earth cannot be made whole again by acacia and babul taking root on an arid plain a thousand miles to the northwest. The vegetable world of the comic vision, to borrow a distinction this kind of criticism has taught us to draw, is a garden or grove continuous with the life it replaces. What is on offer here instead is a substitution of unlike for unlike, a ledger entry standing in for a forest, and no resolution built on confusing the two deserves to be called green.
The institutions charged with judging this project on ecological grounds have, in the end, judged it largely on strategic ones. Presented in 2022 with a challenge to the environmental clearance, the National Green Tribunal found real, unanswered deficiencies in that clearance and ordered a high powered committee to look into them again, only to conclude this year that adequate safeguards exist and that the project’s strategic importance tips the balance in its favour, a finding reached partly on the strength of a committee report the petitioners' own lawyers were not even permitted to read in full. A tribunal asked whether a forest can survive a port, has in substance, answered a different question altogether, namely whether India can afford to be without one, and these two questions, however much they deserve separate answers, have quietly merged into a single verdict. This is the besetting danger of any criticism, literary or environmental, that lets itself be governed by considerations belonging to another discipline entirely. A tribunal that decides ecology by way of geopolitics has stopped being a tribunal of ecology at all and become something closer to an extension of the ministry it was meant to check.
India has not lacked a different model of resistance. The women who embraced trees in the Himalayan foothills during the nineteen seventies, and the activists who waded into the rising waters of the Narmada two decades on, offered a form of protest continuous with the very land they defended, a repeated and embodied act drawing its force from presence rather than from paperwork. The contest over Great Nicobar has produced no real equivalent so far. Not because the cause is any smaller, but because the geography of resistance itself has changed. The forest in question lies at the farthest edge of the republic, reachable mainly through petition, parliamentary question and tribunal filing rather than through bodies gathering on threatened ground. What was once ritual, a sustained physical claim upon contested land, has now become something closer to an oracle, a scattering of legal fragments, affidavits, sealed committee reports and parliamentary replies, each lighting up a corner of the matter without ever quite assembling the whole.
Beneath the comic vision of a gleaming transshipment hub lies a tragic one that the official narrative is careful never to complete. Galathea Bay, chosen for the port’s deep natural harbour, also happens to be among the principal nesting beaches of the leatherback turtle in this part of the Indian Ocean, and a beach handed over to container traffic rarely keeps a second tenant for long. The Shompen, a hunter-gatherer people numbering only a few hundred, are promised in policy documents that they will not be displaced, even as the very forest reserve overlapping their territory is being de-notified by the same administration issuing that promise. A guarantee that depends on the goodwill of the party most interested in breaking it is not much of a guarantee at all. Whether the comic or the tragic vision turns out to be the truer reading of Great Nicobar will not be settled by the next press release or the next tribunal order. Neither induction from the numbers we presently have, nor deduction from the strategic doctrine framing them, can yet tell us exactly where the forest ends and the argument begins, and it is precisely this uncertainty that ought to keep the question open.
Joel K. Albert is pursuing English from Jamia Millia Islamia
Edited by Arslaan Beg
