Sawt Falasteen - Indian opposition slams Nicobar megaport plan as 'destruction'

The island, nearly 3,000 kilometres (1,860 miles) from New Delhi, sits at the entrance to one of the world's busiest waterways -- the Strait of Malacca, through which up to 30 percent of global maritime trade passes.

The plan to develop the 910 square kilometre (351 square miles) island with a container port, airport and city see swathes of pristine rainforest cut down, including land inhabited for millennia by communities with minimal outside contact.

"What is being done in Great Nicobar is one of the biggest scams and gravest crimes against this country's natural and tribal heritage in our lifetime," Gandhi said in a video message posted on social media, showing him walking through the island's forests.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said the Great Nicobar Island Project "is of strategic, defence and national importance", and India's environmental court gave the green light in February.

But Gandhi said he would try to stop it.

"What I have seen is not a project," he added. "It is millions of trees marked for the axe. It is 160 square kilometres of rainforest condemned to die. It is communities that have been ignored while their homes have been snatched away."

Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav last year insisted that the project "poses no threat to the island's tribal groups" and "does not jeopardise the eco-sensitivity of the region".

Around 9,000 people live on the island, including around 1,200 from Indigenous groups, including the Nicobarese and the Shompen, hunter-gatherers who have shunned contact with outsiders, according to rights group Survival International.

"As well as devastating the local environment and the Nicobarese Indigenous communities, the Great Nicobar project would destroy the Shompen, a largely uncontacted people who live in the rainforest," Survival's Sophie Grig said Wednesday.

She called the megaport an "ill-conceived project, which must be cancelled before an entire people are wiped out".

Y.Zaher--SF-PST