A view of Great Nicobar Island. Photo credit: AICC
Congress Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh on Friday (June 19, 2026) termed Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav’s latest defence of the Great Nicobar Island Project “disappointing and unsatisfactory.” He charged the Ministry of an “extraordinary level of non-transparency” in withholding reports, studies and plans on the project’s environmental safeguards.
Mr. Ramesh was replying to a letter from Mr. Yadav dated June 13, which was itself a response to the Congress leader’s communication of June 3. The exchange is the latest in a sustained correspondence stretching back well over a year, in which Mr. Ramesh has repeatedly challenged the adequacy of the project’s environmental impact assessments and the secrecy around the High-Powered Committee (HPC) report on the proposed transshipment port’s coastal regulation status.
Mr. Yadav’s June 13 reply leaned heavily on the National Green Tribunal (NGT). On February 16, 2026, an NGT bench cleared the way for the project, holding that “considering the strategic importance” of it and “other relevant considerations,” it found “no good ground to interfere.” The NGT disposed of a batch of applications challenging the 2022 environmental clearance, directing authorities “to ensure full and strict compliance of EC conditions.” It also accepted the Centre’s stance on keeping the HPC report confidential.
The Hindu had reported on June 5 that a Finance Ministry body, as late as August 2024 had noted in a project approval meeting that the port - a major component of the project and estimated at ₹48,862 crore – “lacked strategic objectives.”
The NGT, Mr. Yadav wrote, had “recognising the strategic and national importance of the project, declined on both occasions to interfere with the clearances,” and the appraisal had been conducted by the Expert Appraisal Committee “with the rigor that is required.”
The ₹81,000-crore project envisages an international container transshipment port at Galathea Bay, an airport, a power plant and a greenfield township on the island. It is expected to involve the felling of close to a million trees and construction on a leatherback turtle nesting site, drawing sustained criticism over its ecological footprint and the rights of the Shompen, a particularly vulnerable tribal group.
Mr. Ramesh countered that the EIAs were “demonstrably inadequate and fall woefully short of guidelines set by” the Ministry itself. Six-monthly compliance reports, he noted, had not been published since March 2024, while conservation and mitigation plans by bodies including the Wildlife Institute of India and the Zoological Survey of India remained unavailable.
Some mitigation measures, such as the “large-scale relocation of coral colonies,” were “clearly unrealistic and almost impossible,” he wrote, arguing the clearance had been “granted prematurely and hastily.” The strategic rationale, he added, was no justification for opacity: everything he sought “in no way comes in the way of fulfilling so-called strategic objectives.”
Published - June 19, 2026 12:23 pm IST
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