NGT clears Great Nicobar Island mega-infrastructure project, cites ‘strategic importance’

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Monday (February 16, 2026) cleared the Great Nicobar Island mega-infrastructure project, disposing of the petitions challenging the environmental clearances granted to the project. The NGT took note of the “strategic importance” of the project, and said that it “finds no good ground to interfere.”

The ₹92,000 crore project will include a transshipment port, an international airport, a township, and a power plant to be built on more than 160 sq. km. of land. Of this, about 130 sq. km. is forest land inhabited by the Nicobarese and the Shompen communities, both Scheduled Tribes, with the Shompen categorised as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group.

Also read | The making of an ecological disaster in the Nicobar

While the environmental clearances granted to the project had been challenged before a Bench of the NGT, the challenge to the forest clearances is being heard in the Calcutta High Court. The Calcutta High Court has posted the matter before it for “final hearing” in the week beginning March 30 this year.

The Union Government had earlier defended the the project at the NGT in October 2025 saying that it has mandated conservation and monitoring programmes to run for the next three decades as the project is developed. “We have brought in the best scientific resources available to man this, to take this forward, to carry out research and suggest mitigation, and guide us through the thirty years of this project,” Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati had said, stressing that the project “is going to be a national asset”.

The project has attracted flak from experts who have expressed concern over its ‘grave’, irreversible’ impact. More than 70 scholars, former bureaucrats, activists, lawyers, and environmentalists had written an open letter in 2025 urging Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav to “set aside political considerations” and focus on the project’s “grave and irreversible negative implications”.

The Hindu had reported in January this year that members of the Tribal Council in Little and Great Nicobar have allegedly been pressured by the district administration to “surrender ancestral lands” to make way for the project. Parts of the project in Galathea Bay, Pemmaya Bay, and Nanjappa Bay require the diversion of forest lands on which the indigenous Nicobarese people had been living before the 2004 tsunami.