NITI Aayog has released a document entitled ‘Sustainable Development of Little Andaman Island - Vision Document’, a plan for the “development” of the 680 sq km, fragile Little Andaman Island in the Andaman and Nicobar group. The plan is to build a new greenfield coastal city with a free trade zone that will compete with Singapore and Hong Kong.
The project will include three development zones:
Zone 1: Spread over 100 sq km along the east coast of Little Andaman, this zone will include a financial district, medical city, aerocity, and a tourism and hospital district.
Zone 2: Spread over 85 sq km of pristine forest, this leisure zone will include a film city, residential district and tourism SEZ.
Zone 3: Again on 52 sq km of pristine forest, this will be a nature zone including an exclusive forest resort, nature-healing district and nature retreat.
The grand plan includes ‘underwater’ resorts, casinos, golf courses, convention centres, plug-and-play office complexes, a drone port with fully automated drone delivery system, nature cure institutes and more. An international airport capable of handling all types of aircraft will be central to this vision.
The only jetty on the island will be expanded and a marina will be developed next to the tourist entertainment district. A 100 km greenfield ring road will be constructed parallel to the coastline from east to west and will be supplemented with a mass rapid transit network with stations at regular intervals.
The vision document lists some blocks to this development:
- Lack of good connectivity with Indian mainland and global cities
- A fragile biodiversity and natural ecosystems
- Certain Supreme Court notifications that pose an impediment to development
- Presence of indigenous tribes and concerns for their welfare”.
95% of Little Andaman is covered in forest, a large part of it the pristine evergreen type. Some 640 sq km of the island is Reserve Forest under the Indian Forest Act, and nearly 450 sq km is protected as the Onge Tribal Reserve, creating a unique and rare socio-ecological-historical complex of high importance.
The project requires 240 sq km (35%) of this land and the solutions suggested are simple and straightforward — de-reserve 32% of the reserved forest and de-notify 138 sq km or 31% of the tribal reserve. And if the tribals become an impediment, the vision suggests that they “can be relocated to other parts of the island”. The plan has no financial details, no budgeting, or inventorisation of forests and ecological wealth and no details of any impact assessment.
In a note dated September 26, 2020, Divisional Forest Officer, Little Andaman, raised serious concerns about this vision on grounds of ecological fragility, indigenous rights and vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis. The note said such large diversion of forest land would cause obvious environmental loss leading to irreversible damage (more than 2 million trees stand in the forest land sought for this project), that habitats of various wild animals including endangered sea turtles would be affected, and that the impact could not even be assessed because there was no environment impact assessment report and neither were there any detailed site layout plans for the proposed diversion. This note of dissent has been ignored in the plan.
The plan has raised the alarm among conservationists.
This post is based on a report by Pankaj Sekhsaria, a wellknown conservationist and researcher on the Andamans in The Hindu.
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