Bulldozers Come for One of the World's Most Isolated Islands as India Pushes a $9 Billion Megaport
The plan to remake remote Great Nicobar with a transshipment port, an airport and a city for a million tourists is billed as a strategic counter to China — but critics warn it could fell a million trees and imperil two Indigenous tribes.
On a remote, densely forested island near the southern tip of India's territory, surveyors and heavy machinery are arriving for one of the most ambitious — and contested — infrastructure projects the country has ever attempted. India plans to spend roughly $9 billion transforming Great Nicobar Island into a strategic hub, and the bulldozers are already moving.
The blueprint is sweeping. It calls for a deep-water transshipment port able to handle the world's largest container ships, an airport with both civilian and military functions, a power plant, and an entirely new township designed to host up to a million tourists a year — nearly a hundred times the island's current population. Backers see Great Nicobar as a natural choke point: it sits just about 150 kilometers from the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest and most strategically vital shipping corridors on Earth, through which a huge share of global trade and energy flows.
The project's strategic logic is explicitly tied to China. As Beijing has expanded its naval reach and commercial footprint across the Indian Ocean, New Delhi has sought to fortify its position in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, which juts into those waters. Indian officials and analysts have described the island's potential as a kind of Hormuz-like leverage point, allowing India to monitor and, if necessary, influence traffic moving between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
But the plan has drawn fierce opposition from environmental groups, scientists and opposition politicians. Critics say the development will require the diversion of vast tracts of forest land, with estimates that as many as a million trees could be felled. Farms, beaches and hills, they warn, will be swallowed up, and fragile coastal and marine ecosystems — including coral reefs and turtle nesting sites — could be damaged or destroyed.
Looming over the debate is the fate of the island's Indigenous inhabitants. Around 1,761 members of the Shompen and Nicobarese peoples live on Great Nicobar, including the Shompen, a small, largely uncontacted hunter-gatherer community whose survival depends on the island's interior rainforest. Advocates argue that the influx of workers, tourists and construction could prove catastrophic for groups with little immunity to outside disease and no say in a project that will reshape their homeland. The government maintains the development can proceed with safeguards, but for now the loudest sound on one of the planet's most isolated islands is the rumble of machinery.
Originally reported by KPBS / NPR.