New Delhi, India — The Great Nicobar Island, India’s southernmost point, is geographically closer to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia than to the Indian mainland. The island, roughly the size of Hong Kong, has not been visited by an Indian prime minister since Indira Gandhi’s trip in 1984. India does not even conduct a full census there, with population estimates suggesting fewer than 10,000 residents.
Despite its remote status, the island is now the focal point of a contentious $11 billion development plan by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. The blueprint includes a transhipment port, a civilian-military airport, a power plant, tourism infrastructure, and a township for 350,000 people. Initially justified on economic grounds for maritime trade, the government has increasingly framed the project as critical to India’s strategic security in the region.
This strategic narrative has gained momentum from global events, particularly the U.S.-Iran struggle over the Strait of Hormuz. The situation underscores the importance of controlling a perch over a strategic waterway. For India, that waterway is the Strait of Malacca, through which a third of global trade and seaborne oil flows.
“This island has a strategic value because it is sitting right at the mouth of Malacca [strait],” said Shekhar Sinha, a former vice chief of the Indian Navy. “And if it is [developed as] a commercial setup,” he added, no one would be able to object.
Stretching into the southeastern Bay of Bengal, Great Nicobar lies nearly 1,600 kilometers from mainland India. It is adjacent to the East-West shipping lanes that carry trade between the Gulf, Europe, and East Asia, including China, Japan, and South Korea. The Strait of Malacca itself is only 2.8 kilometers wide at its narrowest point near Singapore.
This strait is especially critical for China, which relies on it for 80 percent of its crude oil imports and two-thirds of its trade. Consequently, Great Nicobar could serve as a valuable sentry for India, monitoring activity at the strait’s western approaches.
“It is a great place to monitor all the traffic, coming in and out of the strait,” Sinha explained. “It would give India an edge in maritime domain awareness,” referring to New Delhi’s ability to track and monitor activity at sea.
The Modi government has formally acknowledged this strategic value. A May press release described the project as “a strategic project which aims to strengthen India’s presence in the Andaman Sea and Southeast Asia.” It stated the project is designed to enhance national security, defence presence, and the islands’ economic position.
However, the project was originally conceived to rival deepwater port economies like Singapore, Sri Lanka’s Colombo, and Hong Kong. This vision has faced stiff resistance, including from the island’s inhabitants who have refused to surrender their lands and have filed legal cases against the government’s plans.
Great Nicobar is home to a few hundred Shompens, a seminomadic hunter-gatherer tribe living in dense forests, and a few thousand Nicobarese who depend on fishing. These Indigenous communities maintain distance from the outside world and the settler population spread over about 1,000 square kilometers.
The government’s project is planned on 166.1 square kilometers of land, roughly 16 percent of the island. Half of this land overlaps with tribal reserve areas inhabited by the Shompens. In February 2024, 39 genocide experts wrote to Indian President Droupadi Murmu, warning the project would be “a death sentence for the Shompen,” tantamount to the international crime of genocide.
India’s environment minister informed Parliament in 2023 that nearly 964,000 trees would be felled for the project. The development would also displace the native Nicobarese community and allow for the settlement of 350,000 people over the next three decades, representing a 4,000 percent population increase.
The ancestral lands of the Nicobarese have been marked for a tourism zone, despite their ongoing protests. The Indian government maintains the criticism is unfounded and that the project will be a model for holistic island development.
Activists, however, warn the project would severely disrupt Great Nicobar’s fragile ecology through large-scale deforestation and coastal alteration. The island also falls in seismic zone 5, the highest earthquake-risk category, making large construction projects particularly vulnerable.
Rahul Gandhi, India’s leader of the opposition, visited the island a month ago and met with local activists. Writing on X, he stated: “The government calls what it is doing here a ‘Project’ … It is communities that have been ignored while their homes have been snatched away. This is destruction dressed in development’s language.”
Gandhi claimed the project was “one of the biggest scams and gravest crimes against this country’s natural and tribal heritage in our lifetime.” He also visited the Indira Point Lighthouse, the southernmost tip of Indian territory, which now stands partially submerged in water due to the 2004 tsunami.
That devastating tsunami sank the land near the southern tip of Great Nicobar by about 4.25 meters, flooding parts of the coastline around Indira Point. “This project is very colonial,” said Manish Chandi, a former member of a government tribal research institute’s advisory board.
Chandi, who has studied the islands for over two decades, believes the main aim is to develop Great Nicobar as a commercial outpost. He argues the strategic narrative is a convenient shift. “It suits the [Modi government’s nationalist] narrative,” Chandi told Al Jazeera.
Some analysts argue that changing geopolitics require India to leverage its geography. “The nature of rapidly changing geopolitics is becoming more challenging,” said Harsh Pant of the Observer Research Foundation. “It is natural for India to relook at its own geography to find leverage to its strategic advantages.”
The Indian armed forces’ tri-service command is based in Sri Vijaya Puram, about 500 kilometers from Great Nicobar. Developing Great Nicobar would “enhance the command, make it more formidable, and use this geography for keeping a tab on what is happening in the wider Indo-Pacific,” Pant said.
While some strategic thinkers suggest India could use Great Nicobar to choke the Strait of Malacca in a conflict with China, former naval officer Shekhar Sinha dismisses such ideas. “The Hormuz Strait belongs to Iran and Oman. Likewise, the Malacca Strait belongs to Indonesia,” Sinha said. “The passage goes through Indonesia.”
He argued that setting up a naval blockade is simple, but maintaining it is difficult. “Look at the US: if that big a navy cannot keep [an] airtight naval blockade of a narrow waterway, how can an Indian navy block the vast Indian Ocean?” Sinha wondered. Still, he acknowledged the island’s development could prove a strategic asset.
“Advance position in Malacca would make the Indian Ocean more transparent for India,” said Sinha. Manish Chandi remains unconvinced, viewing the project as a commercial proposal with destructive scope. “It will be a liability for India and for its defence,” he told Al Jazeera.
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