Developing Great Nicobar: strategic imperative and ecological concerns
- November 22, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Developing Great Nicobar: strategic imperative and ecological concerns
Subject: Geography
Context-
- Last month, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change gave environmental clearance for the ambitious Rs 72,000 crore development project on the strategically important Great Nicobar Island.
- The project is to be implemented in three phases over the next 30 years.
The proposal includes-
- The proposal to develop Great Nicobar was first floated in the1970s
- A greenfield city including an International Container Transhipment Terminal (ICTT),
- A greenfield international airport,
- A power plant,
- A township for the personnel who will implement the project.
- The port will be controlled by the Indian Navy,
- The airport will have dual military-civilian functions.
- Roads, public transport, water supply and waste management facilities, and several hotels have been planned to cater to tourists.
- Around 130 sq km of forests have been sanctioned for diversion, and 9.64 lakh trees are likely to be felled.
About the Great Nicobar island-
- Location-
- Great Nicobar, the southernmost of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has an area of 910 sq km.
- The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a cluster of about 836 islands in the eastern Bay of Bengal.
- The two groups of which are separated by the150- km-wide Ten Degree Channel.
- Indira Point on the southern tip of Great Nicobar Island is India’s southernmost point, less than 150 km from the northernmost island of the Indonesian archipelago.
- Biological diversity-
- Great Nicobar has two national parks (Campbell Bay and Galathea National Park) and a biosphere reserve (Great Nicobar Biosphere reserve).
- Fourteen species of mammals, 71 species of birds, 26 species of reptiles, 10 species of amphibians, and 113 species of fish are found on the island, some of which are The leatherback sea turtle is the island’s flagship species.
- Tribals and settlers of the island-
- The island has the Shompen and Nicobarese tribal peoples, along with ex-servicemen from Punjab, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh who were settled on the island in the
- The Shompen are hunter-gatherers who depend on forest and marine resources for sustenance.
- The Nicobarese, who lived along the west coast of the island, were mostly relocated after the 2004 tsunami.
- An estimated 237 Shompen and 1,094 Nicobarese individuals now live in a 751 sqkm tribal reserve, some 84 sqkm of which is proposed to be denotified.
- The approximately 8,000 settlers who live on the island are engaged in agriculture, horticulture, and fishing.
- Climate-
- The Great Nicobar Island has tropical wet evergreen forests.
The purpose of the project-
- Tap the island’s tourism potential.
- Leverage the locational advantage of the island for economic and strategic reasons.
- Great Nicobar is equidistant from Colombo to the southwest and Port Klang and Singapore to the southeast and positioned close to the East-West international shipping corridor, through which a very large part of the world’s trade passes.
- The proposed ICTT can potentially become a hub for cargo ships travelling on this route.
The concerns include-
- Infrastructure development in an ecologically important and fragile region,
- The felling of almost a million trees
- The loss of tree cover which will in turn lead to increased runoff and sediment deposits in the ocean
- Impact on the coral reefs in the area.
- The loss of mangroves.
- India has translocated a coral reef from the Gulf of Mannar to the Gulf of Kutch earlier
- A conservation plan for the leatherback turtle is also being put in place.
The project site is outside the eco-sensitive zones of Campbell Bay and Galathea National Park.