







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 1 (1): 91–95, April 2018 

 
NOTES FROM THE FIELD 

 

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Are Not an 
‘Empty Space’ 
 

Pankaj Sekhsaria  
 
1. INTRODUCTION 

In July earlier this year (2017), I had the opportunity of a series of 
interactions with long-time residents of areas in and around Port Blair, the 
administrative headquarters of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. One of 
the key pivots of the presentations I made was a recent plan for the 
development of the islands that was first publicized by the NITI Aayog in 
late 2015 and has been pushed aggressively ever since at various levels. The 
plan is titled ‘An approach paper on “Prospects of Island Development – 
Options for India”’ (Anon. 2015), and it proposes a range of projects. 
These include a railway line connecting Port Blair in the south to Diglipur 
in the north of the Andaman group; a petrochemical complex and a special 
economic zone (SEZ) for Mayabandar in Middle Andaman Island; a port 
and a huge tourism complex in Little Andaman Island; and a trans-
shipment terminal, a port, and wind and solar energy farms in Great 
Nicobar Island.  

In a meeting of the NITI Aayog held in September 2016, a part of the plan 
for promoting high-end tourism was granted approval. In November 2016, 
a follow-up call was issued for proposals for the ‘Preparation of Concept 
Development Plans and Detailed Master Plans for Holistic Development of 
10 Islands’ (NITI Aayog 2016). A few months later, in February 2017, the 
incumbent Lt. Governor of the islands, Prof Jagdish Mukhi, also 

 
 Senior Project Scientist, DST-Centre for Policy Research, Department of Humanities and 
Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. He is a long-time member of the environmental action group 
Kalpavriksh. He has worked in the Andaman and Nicobar islands for over two decades; 
psekhsaria@gmail.com 

Copyright © Sekhsaria 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.22   

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.22


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [92] 

announced a Rs. 2,400 crore 240-kilometre railway project to connect Port 
Blair with Diglipur—the stated rationale being that this will be a strategic 
asset and also boost tourism in the islands.  

 

2. FORCED IRRELEVANCES  

One framework that the NITI Aayog plan and proposal should have 
considered is the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes 
Regulation (ANPATR), promulgated in 1956 (ANPATR 1956). Under the 
provisions of this regulation, significant areas of the islands have been 
protected for the island’s indigenous communities, like the Jarawa, Onge, 
and Shompen. These parts of the islands are the last remaining strongholds 
of the tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen forests that once clothed the 
entire island chain, and are crucial habitat, therefore, for the famed 
biological diversity of these tropical islands (Sekhsaria 2013). Significantly, 
however, the NITI Aayog approach paper of about 40 pages does not 
mention it at all, even as it goes on to propose a number of projects that 
will impinge directly on the land and rights of the indigenous communities 
protected under the regulation. What is additionally shocking is there was 
no accounting in the NITI Aayog plan of the fact that the islands are prone 
to extensive tectonic activity and were impacted severely in the aftermath of 
the earthquake and the tsunami of 2004 (Abbany 2016; ASC 2010; 
Sekhsaria 2009).  

The central point that I sought to communicate during my presentations 
and interactions was that this particular plan continued in line with others 
from the past where concerns over the islands’ indigenous peoples, 
ecological diversity, and geological volatility and vulnerability were being 
given a complete go-by. If anything, the vulnerability of the islands and its 
denizens was only being increased manifold by a non-accounting of their 
uniqueness and specific socio-cultural-ecological-historical context. 

I was surprised by the reaction of the islanders on two counts of general 
non-awareness. One, overall, this community did not know of the 
ecological richness, on the one hand, or of their extreme vulnerability to the 
tectonic volatility of the island chain. Two, a large number of them did not 
know at all about the NITI Aayog approach paper, leave alone the details of 
the specific proposals that had been made. 

The implications of this are indeed are multifold, and can be understood 
simultaneously as a cause of the present state of affairs as also an outcome 
of ways of thinking about and looking at the islands. The interactions 
reinforced for me the belief that all efforts notwithstanding, the islands 
remain on the fringes of the national consciousness and are considered 



[93] Pankaj Sekhsaria 

relevant only as adjuncts to a nation that is destined to be nothing less than 
a global superpower. Nothing exemplifies this better than how the islands 
are being mobilized as an important outpost in the rapidly escalating 
narrative of their geopolitical and strategic importance. 

 

3. A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT FOR THE ISLANDS 

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands have always occupied an important 
place in the Indian imagination as a security and strategic outpost. The 
sentiment has been expressed repeatedly over the years, and its logic was 
evident in the comments made in 2012 by Admiral Nirmal Verma, then 
Chief of Naval Staff. Speaking on the occasion of the commissioning of 
INS Baaz on Great Nicobar Island as the first Naval Air Station in the 
Nicobars, Verma (2012) made the point very unequivocally:  

The islands of the Andaman and Nicobar group have always occupied the 
consciousness of the security and defence community of our nation. The 
geographic disposition of the archipelago, separated as it is by more than 650 
nautical miles from our mainland, offers a vital geo-strategic advantage to India. 
(…) Apart from geography, the economic potential of the islands is also 
remarkable, being endowed with a vast Exclusive Economic Zone, accounting 
for almost 30% of India’s entire EEZ. They also sit astride some of the busiest 
shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean, most carrying strategic cargo for the East 
Asian economies. 

In a fast-changing international economic and security environment, the 
islands have become an even more highly valued asset. It has become 
explicit in articulations such as prominent commentator Ashok Malik’s 
2014 article in the Hindustan Times, where he referred to these islands as ‘a 
prized piece of mid-ocean real estate that policy gurus in Delhi have 
consistently neglected and left unexploited’ (Malik 2014). 

Nothing signifies this better and more chillingly than the late, and former 
President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam’s vision for the islands. Speaking 
during his inaugural address at a security seminar organized by the defence 
establishment in Port Blair in 2009, he visioned the future islands to have 
among other things a: 

250 MW nuclear power station on one of the Islands for A & N exclusively, … 
bases for static aircraft carrier with dynamic warfare system & connectivity 
between the Islands with fiber optic network, a nuclear submarine based fleet 
and … a robust tsunami forecasting and communication system (Anon. 2009). 

The scale of intervention proposed—and its hugely technocratic-militaristic 
tenor—is in line with the growing defence and strategic interest in this 
group of islands. In proposing a nuclear power plant in one of the world’s 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [94] 

most seismically active zones, however, it betrays a complete lack of 
awareness of the geologic, tectonic, and historical contexts of these islands. 
Not only is there no assessment of the economic and technical viability of 
such a power plant (how it will be constructed; how the power will be 
evacuated), the vulnerability and risk generated on account of its location in 
this seismically active zone has not been accounted for at all either. 

 

4. TERRA NULLIUS? 

Whether these huge projects will indeed be executed is something only time 
will tell, but what these ideas betray, like in the case of Kalam’s nuclear 
plant suggestion, is a stark ignorance of the historical, social, ecological, and 
legal context of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The envisioning of such 
projects does not acknowledge factors such as the extreme seismicity of 
these islands—the earthquake that caused the gigantic tsunami of 
December 2004 was epicentred only a 100 nautical miles from the Nicobar 
Islands. It ignores the islands’ ecological fragility—the high diversity and 
endemism of plant and animal species—and even the legal provisions for 
forest protection and the rights of the indigenous peoples. The premise, 
clearly, is what anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya has described in the case of 
these islands as that of ‘terra nullius’—empty, unexplored, virgin territory 
that is waiting to be acted upon and operationalized. 

One needs only to scratch the surface a little to realize how deeply flawed 
and violative these projects and visioning are of constitutional rights and of 
moral propriety. Ideas of vulnerability, sensitivity, and fragility are being 
given a complete go-by. In the end, the price will be paid only by these 
islands and their varied human and non-human denizens. It is not a new 
story, but it has a magnified resonance here because these islands are unique 
and special in more ways than one! 

 

REFERENCES 

Abbany, Z. 2016. “Ring of Fire: Five facts about the most earthquake prone region 
in the world.” https://p.dw.com/p/2TtCF  

Amateur Seismic Centre. 2010. “Earthquakes in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, 
India.” http://asc-india.org/seismi/seis-andaman-nicobar.htm  

Anon. 2009. “Kalam inaugurates seminar on security and development of 
Andaman and Nicobar.” http://andamanchronicle.com/content/view/1464/27/  

Anon. 2015. “An approach paper on Prospects of Island Development - Options 
for India.” New Delhi: Integrated Headquarters of Ministry of Defence (Navy). 

https://p.dw.com/p/2TtCF
http://asc-india.org/seismi/seis-andaman-nicobar.htm
http://andamanchronicle.com/content/view/1464/27/


[95] Pankaj Sekhsaria 

ANPATR. “Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 
Including all amendments till 2004, No. 4 C. F. R. (1956).” Andaman & Nicobar 
Administration. 

Malik, A. 2014. “Our string of islands theory.” Hindustan Times. 2 September. New 
Delhi. 

NITI Aayog. 2016. “Request for Qualification (RFQ)-cum-Request for Proposal 
(RFP) for Consultancy for ‘Preparation of Concept Development Plans and 
Detailed Master Plans for Holistic Development of 10 Islands.’” New Delhi: NITI 
Aayog, Government of India. 

Sekhsaria, P. 2009. “When Chanos Chanos became Tsunami Macchi: The Post-
December 2004 scenario in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.” Journal of the Bombay 
Natural History Society 106 (3): 256–262. 

Sekhsaria, P. 2013. “Tribal reserves, IBAs, and bird conservation: The unique case 
of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.” Indian Birds 104(9): 85–90. 

Verma, N. 2012. “Address by Admiral Nirmal Verma Chief of Naval Staff, on the 
Commissionng of INS BAAZ (NAS CAMPBELL BAY).” 
http://ajaishukla.blogspot.in/2012/07/ins-baaz-indian-navys-air-station-in.html  

http://ajaishukla.blogspot.in/2012/07/ins-baaz-indian-navys-air-station-in.html

