Great Nicobar Island. File
| Photo Credit: AFP
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration has notified the beginning of the resettlement and rehabilitation census in the Great Nicobar Island to make way for the trunk infrastructure part of the Centre’s ₹92,000 crore container port, airport, and tourist-township project.
In a public notice put up on Tuesday (June 9, 2026), the Office of the Assistant Commissioner in Campbell Bay notified that document verification for the rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) census will begin on June 10 at the recreation hall in Kamal Basti.
The notice called for all families affected by the trunk Infrastructure part of the Great Nicobar Island mega-infrastructure project to keep about 24 different types of documents ready that may be required by the census team.
The trunk infrastructure includes the construction of the trunk road and related infrastructure on Great Nicobar Island as the first steps for the project that has a timeline going up to 2050, according to the draft Master Plan. This draft Master Plan has outlined a vision of turning the island into a greenfield township with a tourism-based economy, while also providing for defence infrastructure, an airport and an international transhipment container port.
While the Nicobarese tribal council on the island, anthropologists, environmentalists, and Opposition leaders have called for the government to rethink the project, given the threat it poses to the area’s ecology, geography, and indigenous communities’ rights, the government has maintained that the larger idea behind the project was to use the project to strengthen its strategic presence in the region.
Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram had recently centred the project’s strategic importance by saying it is meant to be a model for “frontier infrastructure development” because India cannot leave such sensitive geographies underdeveloped. On Monday (June 8, 2026), the Defence Ministry reiterated the strategic nature of the project in Great Nicobar.
This statement from the Defence Ministry comes days after The Hindu reported that in 2024, the Public Investment Board (PIB), a Finance Ministry body that appraises large public investments, had termed the proposed container transhipment port as lacking in “strategic objectives”.
Published - June 10, 2026 12:10 am IST
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