Tribal leaders slam the authorities for pressuring them to sign “surrender certificates” and lose their ancestral lands hit by the 2004 tsunami. At the heart of the dispute is the Great Nicobar Island Development Project, a plan of nearly US$ 9 billion that includes a port, an airport, and a power plant. The Nicobarese and Shompen peoples are demanding to right to return to their original villages, while environmentalists and scientists warn that the plan poses risks to biodiversity and is threatened by seismic activity.

Sri Vijaya Puram (AsiaNews) – A multi-billion-dollar mega-infrastructure project risks wiping out the legacy of the tribal communities living on the Nicobar Islands and compromise one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.

The archipelago, together with the Andaman Islands, constitutes a Union Territory of India, under direct control from New Delhi.

The islands, which serve as strategic sentinels for India at the crossroads of the Bay of Bengal sea lanes, are now at the centre of a growing dispute due to pressure on tribal leaders to formally give up their ancestral lands.

In recent days, members of the Great Nicobar Tribal Council reported receiving verbal requests from government officials to sign so-called surrender certificates, that would sanction the permanent loss of rights to ancestral lands hit by the 2004 tsunami.

Although Nicobarese communities were resettled after the disaster in settlements like Rajiv Nagar, they have been demanding for years the right to return to their original villages, considered an integral part of their cultural, social, and spiritual identity.

Signing such certificates, tribal leaders contend, would permanently bar them from their lands, paving the way for the implementation of the massive Great Nicobar Holistic Development Project.

This plan, estimated at approximately Rs 81,800 crore (about US$ 8.9  billion), would turn the Great Nicobar Island into a globally significant logistics and strategic hub.

The project has four main components: an International Container Transshipment Terminal (ICCT) in Galathea Bay, a dual-use international airport for civil and military use, a 450 MVA gas and solar power plant, and the construction of a new township.

To build these infrastructures, approximately 166.10 square kilometres of land will be converted, including approximately 130 square kilometres of dense forest, partly overlapping with over 84 square kilometres of tribal reserve.

According to official estimates and independent assessments, the project would involve the felling of 850,000 to several million trees, with a potentially devastating impact on crucial habitats, including the nesting sites of the giant leatherback turtle, a critically endangered species.

The islands are home to communities that have lived in isolation or semi-isolation for thousands of years, including the Shompen, a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer people living in the interior forests of Great Nicobar.

Classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG), they number just 250 individuals and speak a language that has not yet been described, making it hard to fully understand their conceptual and spiritual relationship with the land.

They live alongside the Nicobarese, a community of approximately 1,200 people settled in Greater Nicobar, traditionally dedicated to coconut and pandanus cultivation, fishing, and hunting.

After the 2004 tsunami, many of them were forcibly relocated, cut off from their roots, profoundly weakening the community's social fabric. In fact, behind the archipelago's idyllic image lies a profound social crisis.

According to official data and studies cited by Indian media, the territory has a suicide rate of 49.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest in the country and almost four times the national average, due to geographic isolation, few economic opportunities outside public employment, and the erosion of traditional ties caused by forced resettlement.

Added to these factors are environmental and geological challenges. The archipelago is in a zone of extremely high seismic vulnerability (Zone V) and is particularly exposed to the effects of climate change.

Sea level rise in the area is proceeding at a rate about 30 per cent greater than the global average.

In this context, the construction of massive reinforced concrete infrastructure raises serious questions about the sustainability and long-term safety of a project destined to radically transform the face of Greater Nicobar.

“We are against this,” a Tribal Council member told Scroll magazine on condition of anonymity. “This would mean that we have given the land directly in the administration’s hands forever. It is important for our children’s future security.”

Tribal representatives insisted that they have not signed any documents, asking for time for collective deliberation. Nicobar’s assistant commissioner declined to comment, saying he was not authorised to speak.

Nicobar communities, meanwhile, continue to demand the right to return to their ancestral villages along the island's western coast, from which they were displaced after the 2004 tsunami.

“Before settling us, they told us that this is a temporary measure,” said a council member. “Our population is slowly increasing, and we cannot expand our houses here. There is no space for cultivating anything.” “It’s been 21 years since we were relocated,” said another.

Families grew coconuts and pandanus trees and lived off fishing on those lands, and even today, some return for brief periods to tend the plantations.

Last August, the Tribal Council wrote to the Union Minister for Tribal Affairs, accusing the islands' administration of making false representation to the central government, claiming that all rights under the 2006 Forest Rights Act (FRA) had already been recognised before the forest lands are diverted for the project.

“If the administration is claiming that they have settled these rights under FRA, then what is the need for such surrender certificates?” asked a tribal chief. In fact, the communities' final demand is unchanged: “If they want to do the project, they should do it on the non-tribal lands,” the latter added.

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• india
• nicobar islands
• nicobarese
• shompen
• indigenous peoples
• logistic hub
• bay of bengal