19 august 2024 : The residents of Great Nicobar Island, who will be affected by land acquisition for the Greenfield International Airport project, have raised demands for a fair and comprehensive compensation package after a social impact assessment (SIA) report was submitted before the Union Territory administration last month.
The proposed project — part of the Rs 72,000-crore Great Nicobar Infrastructure Project — comprises a transshipment port, Greenfield International Airport, power plant, township and allied developments. It will be built on 834.6 hectares of land, of which nearly 400 hectares is private land and the rest is government land.
In June, Delhi-based Probe Research and Social Development Pvt. Ltd, the agency that carried out the SIA study, had held a public hearing on the draft SIA with the stakeholders. After this, the final SIA report, detailing private land acquisition, loss of plantations and project impacts was submitted to the Andaman and Nicobar administration late last month. An SIA study is legally mandated under the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR), 2013.
Residents of Gandhi Nagar and Shastri Nagar in Campbell Bay taluk, the two villages where nearly 400 hectares of land will be acquired for the project, have raised concerns that displacement for the airport will cause hardship and loss of livelihoods. Project-affected residents criticised the SIA report for not fully capturing the potential impacts of the large project. They have demanded, among other things, that the local administration should revise circle rates for land, fix higher compensation for loss of fruiting trees and provide jobs for one family member of each affected family and shops near the proposed airport.
“The families that settled here in the 1970s had to face a lot of hardships as resources were not plentiful. The community also suffered loss of land during the great tsunami of 2004. This will be another episode of displacement and hardship for us. We want land in lieu of land and Rs 50,000 for each coconut tree that will be lost,” said Prahlad Singh, 43, Pradhan of Laxmi Nagar Gram Panchayat, which comprises the affected villages of Shastri Nagar and Gandhi .
The Greenfield Airport project will affect 263 families, as per the SIA report, and nearly all of the coconut, betel nut, guava, banana and mango plantations will be acquired for the project.
The project-affected families belong to the ex-servicemen community and were settled in GNI from different parts of mainland India four to five decades ago. Coconut and betel nut farming forms the mainstay of their income source. Nearly 30,000 coconut trees, 60,000 betel nut trees, 450 mango trees and other fruit trees such as guava and banana will be lost to land acquisition, as per the SIA report.
E S Rajesh, the pramukh and samiti member of Laxmi Nagar Gram Panchayat, told The Indian Express that the SIA report fails to mention what would be the adverse impacts of the project on the water resources of the region. “There would be an influx of outsiders because of not only the airport construction work, but also the tourism that it will attract. There are issues of water shortages even now. But the report has not analysed these issues,” he said.
The Directorate of Social Welfare Department, Andaman & Nicobar administration, to whom the report was submitted, did not respond to queries seeking comment.
The SIA report is also silent on the potential impacts of the airport project on the indigenous Great Nicobarese and Shompen tribespeople. Earlier, a group of over 100 former bureaucrats had written to the Centre criticising the draft SIA report. Social scientists and wildlife scientists, too, demanded that the airport development’s impact on the tribal communities ought to be weighed.
“The airport area covers 8.88 sq km of deemed forest, which is part of the Tribal Reserve area in Great Nicobar. This would certainly affect the Shompen and the Great Nicobarese. Yet the SIA has not taken the trouble to communicate with them.” the ex-bureaucrats under the banner of Constitutional Conduct Group had said in a June 17 letter.
After the SIA report’s submission, a multi-disciplinary expert group is evaluating it, as per the procedure laid down in the LARR Act, 2013. The expert group, comprising two independent social scientists, local panchayat members and government officials met on August 12 and decided to conduct a field visit of the island on 26 and 27 August.
