Strategic Addendum: On the Great Nicobar Project

For a project so often mentioned as a matter of national security strategy, the burgeoning development of Great Nicobar Island, now estimated at ₹91,000 crore, rests on a remarkably thin strategic record. The center has long cited the “strategic” nature of its hub – the Galathea Bay transshipment – to withhold information about its environmental permits. Yet the Public Investment Board (PIB), a Treasury body, found in August 2024 that the port “lacked strategic objectives”. This label arrived later, from the Ministry of Defence, and looks less like a basic rationale than an afterthought, shoehorned into the balance sheet. Both the PIB and the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) approved the proposal, but the PPPAC rejected ₹12,230 crore in funding for the viability gap and told the Ports Department to find the money in its own budget – an unusual rebuke for an enterprise sold as nationally vital. If a port cannot stand on commercial revenue and if its true purpose is military, the arguments for a commercial transshipment melt away.

Great Nicobar lies at the southern tip of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, surrounded by tropical rainforest and surrounded by reefs of rare ecological value. The project – a port, international airport, power plant and town – would clear vast tracts of this forest, much of it primary, and disturb the nesting beaches of the leatherback turtle and the home of the endemic Nicobar megapod. Scientists who have studied the island warn that the loss would be irreversible and that what is cut down here cannot replace any reforestation elsewhere. The indigenous inhabitants of the island have their own objections, they go alongside the ecological ones, but they are not reducible to them. Tribal councils said approval was secured without full disclosure and asked that ancestral land and resettlement promised after the 2004 tsunami not be suppressed by the project. Their criticism is not a rejection of all development. The dispute is over scale, secrecy and succession – a project conceived on a scale the island cannot absorb. The solution is transparency. The Center should publish the high-powered committee report in full, openly accounting for the true cost to the exchequer and comparing it to the environmental loss that the exchequer can never make up. A project of this magnitude owes the country at least that much.

Published – 9 Jun 2026 0:10 AM IST