Picture it: 2040. Night falls over the Indian Ocean. A container ship flying a Maersk flag clears the Malacca Strait, turns northwest, and docks not at Colombo or Singapore but at Galathea Bay, Great Nicobar. Fourteen million containers move through this port each year. A dual-use airstrip capable of landing an A-380 cuts through the tropical sky. Radar arrays, silent and watchful, track naval movements 150 kilometres to the south. Behind the cranes and cargo, the arithmetic is striking: India currently spends $200 million annually routing its own trade through foreign ports, while this island hub is projected to ease a logistics burden that today consumes 16 percent of GDP. This is not fantasy. This is the trillion-dollar maritime economy India is building. Getting here will require India to do what it has always done eventually: argue loudly, then build anyway.
There is something recognisable in how India approaches large change. A proposal arrives, debate follows passionate, prolonged and then, a few years later, the project quietly becomes part of everyday life. Ask anyone who protested the Aarey car shed; they are probably on that metro line now, saving forty minutes each way. The Sardar Sarovar Dam, contested by the Narmada Bachao Andolan for decades, now sends water to fields and taps across three states. The debate photographs yellow in archives. The water keeps flowing. Great Nicobar will follow the same arc except the stakes are not commutes or canals. They are the sovereignty of India’s southernmost frontier.
And sovereignty, as every maritime power in history has understood, is geography. The United States built Diego Garcia because a mid-ocean runway changes the calculus of power projection. Singapore fits inside Great Nicobar with room to spare, yet handles more shipping than almost anywhere because someone looked at a map and built. China did the same math, only quietly. Hambantota. Gwadar. Chittagong. The Coco Islands, barely a hundred kilometres from our shores. Indian strategists call it the “String of Pearls”.
Meanwhile, sixty percent of India’s own transshipment cargo travels through Colombo and Singapore, we pay competitors to handle our own trade. Great Nicobar sits forty nautical miles from the East-West shipping lane with natural depths exceeding twenty metres. It is India’s Diego Garcia, its Singapore moment, its answer to Hambantota — all at once.
The idea is not new, Rajiv Gandhi saw the same map in 1985. In November 1985, Rajiv Gandhi gave an interview to the Khaleej Times of Dubai, proposing to open the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to industrialists. He envisioned them as a rival to Singapore, planning two thousand industries by 2000. The vision collapsed not from lack of ambition but from lack of method, large tracts of virgin forest were cleared for oil palm cultivation, raising serious ecological and tribal concerns. The dream was shelved for three decades.
Three decades later, it was revived in September 2020, when NITI Aayog issued a Request for Proposals for a master plan. AECOM India’s 2021 pre-feasibility report identified Great Nicobar’s equidistance between Colombo, Klang, and Singapore as its core strategic asset. Scholars had long described these islands as “sovereignty unexercised.” Galathea Bay was de-notified as a protected area to enable the project. This time, the architecture was different: statutory process, public hearings, expert committees. The execution was finally serious.
What serious execution looked like, in practice, was this: a Hyderabad firm conducted the environmental assessment; a public hearing followed in January 2022 at Campbell Bay, where locals and officials argued for hours. Forest clearance for 130.75 square kilometres came in October 2022, and the Environment Ministry issued its clearance the following month with forty-two conditions covering coral reefs, tribal welfare, disaster preparedness. The National Green Tribunal reviewed the project in April 2023 and appointed a High Powered Committee on coral damage and baseline data; a site inspection in June 2023 found no coastal zone violations. On 16 February 2026, the NGT dismissed remaining petitions, not because it stopped caring, but because the law, on these facts, said proceed. Protests continued, including Rahul Gandhi’s April 2026 visit calling it “destruction dressed in development’s language.”
The irony is hard to miss. The National Green Tribunal established under the NGT Act, 2010, by the Congress-led UPA government has twice upheld the project that Congress now opposes. The NGT noted that 82 percent of Great Nicobar Island will remain under protected forests, national parks, and biosphere reserve. Its conditions are enforceable in perpetuity. A 90-day appeal window under Section 22 of the NGT Act runs from February 2026; the courtroom remains open to anyone who believes the law warrants a different result. Beyond the legal debate, a more human question remains: what of the people who have lived here longest?
On tribal welfare, the record is specific. The Shompen Policy of 2015 protects the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. The Forest Rights Act has seen 23.88 lakh individual titles distributed. PM-JANMAN and PM-JUGA, the largest tribal development programmes in India’s history cover over five crore tribal people across 63,000 villages. Rs 75 crore has been provisioned specifically for tribal welfare in Great Nicobar, including geo-surveillance towers and boat ambulances. The NGT itself recorded that tribals were duly represented at the public hearing and will not be displaced.
Old Nicobarese stories speak of Puluga, a spirit in the soil, the water, the sky above. It is a way of saying nothing here is separate. For most of India’s history, these islands were a distant posting, a footnote in textbooks. That is changing. The same isolation that made them forgettable now makes them indispensable. The question was never if India would use them. It was how. Restraint where nature demands. Resolve where sovereignty requires.
Gary Snyder, an American Poet, Environmental Activist, said perhaps for Nicobar:
“Find your place on the planet.
Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
As they say, a culture is no better than its woods. We all are part of one ecosystem, called earth. It means Nicobar’s ecosystem is as connected with the rest of the planet as much as Delhi’s ridge is connected with the rest of the planet.
Great Nicobar tests whether India can align geography with judgment, ambition with accountability. The sea has always been there — patient, watchful, and open. The question is whether India meets it with equal wisdom.
*Sudhir Mishra, Managing Partner, Trust Legal, Advocates and Consultants
**Petal Chandhok, Partner at Trust Legal, Advocates and Consultants
***Veer Vikram Singh, >Associate at Trust Legal, Advocates and Consultants