Mega city: A mirage out in the high seas of Andaman

For over 50 years, the Indian government has considered developing the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in part, to entrench national interests on an island chain whose location can sometimes seem uncomfortably close to other nations. Now, a new proposal suggests turning one island in the archipelago into the “Singapore of India.”

In a 58-page vision document titled the “Sustainable Development of Little Andaman Island,” bearing the emblem of Niti Aayog, a dazzling vision of a developed Little Andaman is shown.

The plan suggests conserving 65% of the island’s virginal landscape while denotifying 6% of existing tribal reserved area on land and 57% of existing tribal area on the water. The proposal, has by parts, surprised, enthralled and enraged experts, officials and stakeholders.

Well-known anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya described the proposal as being rooted in the idea of “terra nullius,” that is, an empty landscape waiting for civilization. “Only, it is not empty. It is inhabited by valuable species and is home to tribal communities that will all be turned upside down to bolster a flawed idea of development,” Pandya said.

Located south of Port Blair and measuring 675.16 square kilometres, Little Andaman is the fourth largest island in the 836-strong archipelago. The island is southernmost in the Andaman cluster and is about 88 kilometres south of Port Blair.

Breathtaking in scale and ambitious in terms of engineering, falling just short of China’s island-building activities in the Spratlys, the project would require crores of rupees in investment and take years to achieve.

Trouble in little paradise

The concept plan proposes dividing the development area into three zones: A 102 square km chunk with four districts: the aerocity, the medicity, the financial district and the tourism and hospitality district.

A second zone is an 85.4 square km leisure area located along the southern coast of the island and to house casino strips, sports institutes, a film city and water-based recreation.

The third zone is a 52 sq km chunk of land on the west coast which has three districts: an exclusive forest resort, nature healing district and west bay nature retreat.

The project would also consume an ill-planned 15 square km red palm oil plantation, which was started sometime in the 1960s on the east coast and subsequently abandoned. But where did this ambitious plan come from?

“That is one of the great missing pieces of information,” said an experienced researcher who had worked in the Andamans and Nicobar Islands for decades.

When asked what origins of the vision document was and what the timeline for the project was, Niti Aayog responded via email that it is merely a Think-Tank.

“It is not an implementing agency. There is a local government in Andaman & Nicobar. You may like to interact with the local administration,” a senior Niti Aayog official wrote.

However, the document itself credits Dr Vivek Rae, the former Chief Secretary of the islands for pushing the idea of a Singapore on the Indian ocean.

In its opening pages, the document cites Dr Rae as stating “there is also a need to open Little Andaman, which is as big as Singapore on the same principles of development as Great Nicobar."

Alluding to the "development impulses" which countries like Singapore and other South East Asian countries have harnessed, the document says, "It would not be far-fetched to visualise a second Singapore-like entity in the Bay of Bengal which would be a pivot for catering to the economic development of the littoral states/countries on the eastern seaboard.”

However, Dr Rae who chaired a 2018 committee called the “Committee for development of Little Andaman and Great Nicobar,” with Pandya and other experts, told DH that he had never conceived of Little Andaman as being the future site of a home-grown Singapore.

'Grand delusion'

“My vision was to turn the island into an Indian version of the Maldives, with high-end eco-tourism,” he said.

While Dr Rae’s committee report which was submitted in 2019 has never been made public, he says that the proposal they made involved turning the defunct palm oil plantation into an eco-tourist hub, coupled to an international airport.

“The palm oil plantation can be turned into a beautiful eco-tourist hub. Maldives got its start in the 1970s after an Italian tour operator started taking people there. Similarly, with the right kind of ecotourism, Little Andaman can support up to 10 lakh high value tourists and backpackers per year, far more than the three lakh-odd tourists the archipelago gets per year at the moment,” he said.

“Instead of doing that, Niti Aayog seems to have jumped the gun,” Dr Rae added. “This talk of a medical city, a financial city is just going too far. What they have floated is a grand delusion.”

Dr Rae, however, is not alone in suggesting that ecotourism done right could be a boon to the island.

"Setting up eco-tourism is not necessarily a bad idea - especially if it can be done with low environmental impact and for the benefit of local communities,” said ecologist Dr Kartik Shanker, who has worked extensively on the island.

"However, the present approach is fundamentally flawed at many levels. This is certainly a place where the people have required more infrastructure and resources, and we would totally support that. But it is also one of the most pristine habitats or forests in the country. Not only is it pristine, it is also unique, because being islands, they have been separated from mainland fauna and flora for millions of years. So you have a whole range of endemic species. The entire community is different and unique. If you preserve the landscape here, you are preserving both evolutionary and cultural history,” he added.

One particularly galling aspect of the proposed development is that the money would be better used to build infrastructure for the people already living there, Pandya said.

“There were previous plans stated by Niti Aayog to set up an international quality golf course on the island, but I cannot conceive of anyone wanting to come and play golf here. You can’t even dial from the mainland to any part of Port Blair or other parts of the island chain,” he added.

The lack of connectivity was discussed during the sixth meeting of the Island Development Agency (IDA) held in New Delhi on 13 January 2020. The Island Development Agency reviewed progress made towards the “Holistic development of islands” programme. However, projects for improving air, sea and digital connectivity were also stated as being implemented. The idea was to digitally connect Port Blair and another seven islands through submarine optical fibre cable.

Lack of services

In addition to poor communication infrastructure, Little Andaman is also dogged by a lack of critical services, especially medical care, which experts said are immediate and pressing concerns.

"Why is the [development] project being proposed here? One should always ask how such development will help people and whether there are suitable alternatives that can achieve the same social goals at lower ecological and environmental cost," Dr Shanker said.

Pandya also pointed out that attempts have been made to set up eco-tourism on Havelock island in the archipelago, with less than stellar results.

“In the name of development, they want to set up an eco-resort, but you pile up plastic bottles — this happened on Havelock. Nobody did the feasibility test about the environmental viability of it. Now, there is a huge eco-resort there, but there are so many plastic bottles they don’t know what to do with it,” Pandya said.

There is also the fact that building cities from scratch on Little Andaman could take years. “This is a 50-year project at the least. But the island can be turned into a high-end eco-tourism hotspot like the Maldives in 10-15 years,” Dr Rae said.

Investment is said to be the key. In his committee's proposal for eco-tourism, Dr Rae said much of the investment would have been from the private sector — some two to three billion dollars — leaving the government to invest in infrastructure like road network, electricity, water supply and an airport.

“It is ultimately about financial viability. If you want to build a medical city, a financial city, where is the money coming from? And is it economically viable? In isolation, Little Andaman cannot hope to capture some of the economic successes of Singapore. Certainly, it may not happen in our lifetimes,” he added.

Rise in sea levels

There is also concern that 'development' would ultimately be undone by rising sea levels due to climate change.

While a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggested that the entire archipelago chain would have to be evacuated in the future due to rising waters, Professor D Shankar, Chief Scientist at the National Institute of Oceanography at Pune, explained that topographic data showed the northern part of the island where tribals would be relegated, would be most at risk of flooding, as terrain here ranges from 5 to 16 metres above sea level.

“The southern part of the island is comparatively better off, with elevations ranging from 16 to 100 metres,” Dr Shankar said, adding that the predicted sea level rise in the worst case scenario is about 2.5 metres by the year 2100.

“What is not known is how concrete infrastructure built on the island will fare during the course of that time,” he said.

Ultimately, as much as rising seas and crumbling concrete, researchers worry about the potential destruction of an ecosystem. They point to swamps of saltwater crocodiles and beaches with leatherback turtles, who could all go the way of the dodo — at least on the sole Indian landscape which they inhabit.

The potential impacts on turtles does worry ecologists who point to the relatively recent discovery that radio transmitters attached to the creatures found that they migrate annually as far south as Australia and as far west as the south African coast, 14,000 km away.

“We are still learning so much about the ecology and biodiversity of the island, and we know these are incredibly important cultural heritage sites. If we bring in this sort of development, we would lose something truly valuable,” said Dr Shanker.