The story of how a progressive environmental rights judgement from the 90s is aiding a genocide.
Imagine this: a plan so grand in its ambition yet so brutal in its execution, that it promises to transform the Great Nicobar Island into the “Hong Kong of the Indian Ocean.” A shiny shipping terminal, an airport, a powerplant, and a township, all constructed atop one of the most ecologically pristine and biodiverse rainforests on Earth. Even at the risk of sinking the island. Welcome to the Great Nicobar Port Project, where the cost of development is a rainforest’s destruction, the decimation of mangroves, and the cultural and physical annihilation of the Shompen people, an indigenous community so isolated, their very survival hangs by a thread. Experts have not minced words: this project risks being classified as an act of genocide.
And what do we get in return? A fantasy of economic growth, and in the sleight of hand of environmental accounting, a “compensation” that borders on the farcical: 24,000 hectares of land in Haryana’s Aravalli range, over 2,000 kilometers away, in mainland India, declared as protected forest. As if a tropical rainforest brimming with endemic species could somehow be swapped out for dry, semi-arid scrublands. But the story gets better, or worse, depending on your threshold for cynicism. A third of this so-called protected forest was quietly opened up for mining activities soon after its declaration. In a single stroke, the promise of compensatory afforestation morphed into a greenwashed cover for profiteering.
To truly understand how we arrived at this environmental catastrophe, we have to rewind to what began as a genuine attempt to protect India’s forests. The Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA) of 1980 was landmark legislation, a long-overdue shield against the rampant deforestation that accompanied India’s rush to modernity. This law required central government approval for converting forest land for non-forest use, an attempt to slow the pace at which forests were being sacrificed at the altar of development. And it worked, initially.
Then came the Supreme Court’s Godavarman judgment in the 1990s, seen at the time as one of the most progressive environmental rulings in India. The judgment demanded that any diverted forest land must be compensated by reforesting non-forest or degraded forest land, also known as Compensatory Afforestation (CA). The intention was noble: no net loss of forest cover. But what was designed as a bulwark against ecological destruction became, through the machinations of successive governments and private capital, the very instrument of that destruction.
CA was supposed to ensure that development didn’t come at the cost of our forests. But somewhere along the way, it commodified them. CA chopped up forests into fragments, by its very definition. Since the point was that there was to be no loss in the number of trees, those became the only way of understanding a forest. Only tree cover was defined under the FCA, while a slew of other legislation dealt with birds, animals, and forest-dependent communities separately, dividing them up into little pieces and not a unit of its own. Trees became data points; biodiversity, an afterthought; communities, collateral damage. Instead of being living ecosystems, forests were reduced to price tags under the Net Present Value system, a financial tool that allowed companies to pay for their destruction, often at bargain rates. The location of the “new” forest didn’t need to match the ecological value of what was lost. It didn’t even need to be in the same region. The Great Nicobar Port is the grotesque culmination of this system: a vibrant rainforest traded for distant, unsuitable land that, in the end, didn’t even stay protected.
The tree cover concept, already flawed in its own right, is made even worse by these compliance gaps. While government estimates put the loss of trees at around 850,000, experts suggest that over 10 million trees will actually be felled for the project. The additional compensation costs are funneled into CAMPA funds, a system historically plagued by misuse. The 2013 CAG audit exposed how these funds, meant for ecological restoration, were instead spent on vehicles, mobile phones, office furniture, and salaries. Even when spent, funds were often directed toward agroforestry or unrelated schemes rather than genuine forest rejuvenation. Classic failures like double counting of reforested areas and inflated survival rates of plantations only deepen the farce. These regulatory failures ensure that even on paper, the promised compensation is a mirage, and on the ground, it’s a disaster.
The fallout is devastating. The Shompen people, whose lives are intertwined with the rainforest, now face cultural erasure. The Nicobarese community stands to lose not just their land but their way of life. The biodiversity, unique flora, fauna, coral reefs, is being sacrificed without a second thought, and with little hope that any compensatory forest could ever replace what is being wiped out. The rainforest is home to endemic species such as the Nicobar Megapod, the Nicobar crab-eating macaque, and the migratory leatherback turtle. And one of the country’s only pristine coral reefs at Galathea Bay is set to be “relocated”, a process India has never successfully attempted before.
What’s most galling is that all of this is being done under the cover of legality, of compliance, of ticking the boxes of environmental clearance. A mechanism designed to protect forests has become the perfect cover for their destruction, with the added bonus of enabling mining fraud and corporate plunder. The Great Nicobar project is not an isolated case. It is the logical, horrifying endpoint of a system that values forests as figures on a balance sheet, not as ecosystems fundamental to our survival.
We need more than just tweaks to this broken system. Compensatory afforestation as it currently exists must be dismantled or fundamentally reimagined. Forests must be recognised as complex, irreplaceable ecosystems, not as commodities to be traded. Any reform must start with restoring the rights of forest-dependent communities, enforcing genuine consent, and placing ecological integrity over profit. Because if we don’t, the Nicobar tragedy will be just one chapter in a much larger story of loss, betrayal, and ecological collapse.
Teja Adarsh Dodda is a Master of Public Policy (MPP) student at the Hertie School.