India's $9 Billion Megaport Brings Bulldozers to One of Earth's Most Isolated Islands

On Great Nicobar, the southernmost speck of India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, the bulldozers have arrived. The Indian government is spending an estimated $9 billion to transform one of the most remote and biologically pristine islands on the planet into a sprawling complex of an international container transshipment terminal, a dual-use civilian and military airport, a power plant and an entirely new township.

The rationale is geostrategic. Great Nicobar sits astride the approaches to the Strait of Malacca, one of the world's busiest shipping arteries, and Indian planners describe it as a Hormuz-like chokepoint that could give New Delhi leverage over Chinese commerce and naval movements in the Indian Ocean. The Great Nicobar Island Development Project, or GNIDP, would anchor India's eastern maritime defenses and divert lucrative transshipment traffic now handled by foreign ports.

The human and ecological costs are staggering. The island is home to a few hundred Shompen, a seminomadic hunter-gatherer tribe that lives deep in its forest interior, as well as a few thousand Nicobarese who depend on its fisheries. India's environment minister told Parliament in 2023 that the project would require felling nearly 964,000 trees. Planners envision settling some 350,000 people on the island over the next three decades — a roughly 4,000 percent increase in its population.

In February 2024, a group of 39 genocide-prevention experts from 13 countries issued an extraordinary warning, declaring that the development "will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide." Isolated peoples like the Shompen have little immunity to common diseases, and scholars say an influx of hundreds of thousands of outsiders into their forest could prove catastrophic. Conservationists add that the project threatens leatherback turtle nesting beaches, coral reefs and one of the last great rainforests in the region.

The government has rejected the criticism. Officials insist that environmental safeguards and tribal-welfare plans are in place, that large tracts will be set aside as reserves, and that the project is essential to national security and economic growth. They point to clearances granted by environmental and tribal-affairs authorities, even as petitioners challenge those approvals in court and activists question how meaningful consultation could have been with communities that, by definition, live apart from the modern state.

For now, the cranes and survey crews are reshaping a coastline that has barely changed in millennia. The dispute over Great Nicobar has become a test of how far a rising power will go in the name of strategic advantage — and whether the rights of a few hundred forest dwellers and an irreplaceable ecosystem can withstand a project that New Delhi has deemed too important to stop.