The Great Nicobar project trades tribal heritage, ecological patrimony, and strategic autonomy for a base that serves American interests more than India’s own.
There is a particular kind of government project that announces itself in the language of destiny. The Great Nicobar development—₹81,000 crore, thirty years, a transshipment port, a dual-use airport, a military outpost at the very tip of the subcontinent—is precisely such a project. It speaks of countering China, dominating the Malacca Strait, securing sea lanes. It wraps commercial ambition in the flag of sovereignty. It moves fast, clears forests, denotifies tribal land, compensates veterans at ₹150 per square metre, and tells anyone who objects that national security is non-negotiable. It is time to negotiate.
The project’s defenders point to geography, and they are right to do so. Great Nicobar’s position—forty to seventy nautical miles from the Six Degree Channel, the western entrance to the Malacca Strait—is genuinely exceptional. China’s energy imports from the Middle East must transit this funnel. A credible Indian military presence here creates leverage: not the power to stop Chinese ships today, but the threat to do so in an extreme future. As deterrents go, the geography is sound.
But deterrence is not strategy. Strategy asks the harder question: deterrence of what, at what cost, and for whose benefit?
The wrong ocean
China’s actual naval architecture in the Indian Ocean is concentrated not to the east but to the north and west. The port at Chittagong in Bangladesh, the deep-water facility being developed at Kyaukphyu on Myanmar’s Arakan coast, the pipeline terminus that bypasses the Malacca Strait entirely by routing oil overland through Myanmar into Yunnan—these are the real instruments of Chinese power projection into the Bay of Bengal and beyond. From Great Nicobar, none of these is meaningfully monitored. The island is a spectator to the game being played in its own neighbourhood.
Meanwhile, the Iran war has rewritten the energy map of the Indian Ocean Region. The sinking of the IRIS Dena—the Iranian frigate that had been India’s guest at the MILAN naval exercise in Visakhapatnam, torpedoed by a US submarine off the Sri Lankan coast in March 2026—was a shock that landed in India’s maritime backyard. Eighty sailors died. The Strait of Hormuz convulsed. And India, the only major economy in the world without a functioning overland gas pipeline, discovered yet again how exposed its energy arteries are.
The IPI pipeline—Iran-Pakistan-India—was strangled by American sanctions. The TAPI—Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India—lies buried under two decades of Afghan instability. India imports forty per cent of its crude through Hormuz. It has no overland alternative, no strategic reserve worthy of the name, and no pipeline diplomacy to speak of. Against this backdrop, a base designed to threaten Chinese shipping at the Malacca Strait is not energy security. It is theatre.
“India bears the ecological destruction, the tribal displacement, the fiscal burden, and the security vulnerability. The United States gains a forward chokepoint outpost without spending a dollar or losing a single sailor.”
The numbers that do not add up
₹12,230 crViability Gap Funding — state subsidy to make port commercially viable
₹150/sqmCompensation to ex-servicemen; comparable land fetches ₹11,000+ for tourism
130 sq kmForest land to be diverted, including two national parks and UNESCO biosphere
The commercial rationale for the transshipment terminal is a fiction the government itself has quietly acknowledged. Singapore handles thirty-seven million containers a year. Colombo, its nearest competitor in the region, is already struggling. Great Nicobar, remote, hinterland-less, reachable only by sea or expensive air logistics, aims to attract four million containers in Phase One. At the tariff of $32.80 per container—already at a twenty per cent discount to Colombo, the minimum required to attract any shipping line—the annual revenue would not cover the interest on the construction loan. This is why the government has offered ₹12,230 crore in Viability Gap Funding: a formal admission that no private operator would build this port on its commercial merits alone.
When a state subsidises a loss-making commercial project at a strategically sensitive location, without transparent tendering, while a single conglomerate already operates thirteen major port terminals across the country, the word that comes to mind is not strategy. It is cronyism. The opacity of the process—”national security” invoked to shield commercial details from public scrutiny—only deepens the suspicion.
A promise broken in writing
Among the least discussed aspects of the project is what it does to the families who were placed on Great Nicobar by the government itself. Between 1969 and 1975, 330 ex-servicemen families were settled on the island—deliberately, strategically—to serve as the living sentinels of a frontier that the state could not otherwise secure after the humiliation of 1962. They came not as settlers pursuing opportunity but as citizens answering a sovereign summons. They cleared jungle, survived cyclones, buried their dead, and watched the 2004 tsunami take everything once already.
Now the state returns, offering ₹113 to ₹180 per square metre for the land those families farm. The same administration offers ₹11,000 to ₹20,500 per square metre for Andaman land acquired for tourism. The disparity is not an accounting error. It is a statement of what the government thinks these families are worth. The ex-servicemen’s forum—with the appropriately resigned acronym DEFENCE-GNI—has asked for ₹1 crore per acre of agricultural land. They are not opposing the project. They are asking the state not to confiscate land that was given to them as compensation for service, now a second time.
This is not merely an injustice. It is a sovereign promise being broken in writing, in plain sight, with the numbers available for anyone to read.
The tribal question that was not asked
The Shompen are approximately 237 people. They are among the most isolated communities on earth, their forest the buffer that has kept the modern world at arm’s length for millennia. The Nicobarese number around a thousand on the island. Together, they are the only communities the Constitution recognises as Scheduled Tribes on Great Nicobar.
The Forest Rights Act—which mandates that tribal communities give their consent before any diversion of forest land on which they have traditional rights—came into force in 2008. It was not implemented on Great Nicobar until July 2022. Within twenty-one days of the required committees being constituted, the Deputy Commissioner issued a certificate declaring all rights settled and consent obtained. The Tribal Council of Little Nicobar and Great Nicobar wrote formally to dispute this claim. Frontline magazine documented the procedural impossibility—statutory consultation processes that take months completed in three weeks. The National Green Tribunal, in February 2026, upheld the clearances anyway, citing “strategic importance.”
Strategic importance, it turns out, is a solvent that dissolves almost everything: environmental law, tribal consent, due process, compensation equity. When a government discovers that a single phrase can suspend the rule of law, it will use that phrase with increasing frequency and decreasing scruple.
A target, not a fortress
The military logic of the project contains its own vulnerability, and it is one that former naval officers have been willing to name. A traditional forward operating base is sparse, hardened, and difficult to identify as a high-value target. What is being built at Great Nicobar is a hybrid: military runways alongside a civilian cruise terminal, naval jetties alongside container cranes, a township of workers and families alongside ammunition stores. Under the laws of armed conflict, a facility that provides direct military logistical support—even if nominally civilian—becomes a legitimate military objective. The civilian overlay does not provide protection; it provides casualties.
The island offers no defensive depth. It cannot be quickly reinforced. A sustained attack—ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, a submarine blockade—could neutralise the entire installation at a cost that is trivial compared to the decades of investment it represents. The very co-location that the government presents as an efficiency is, in strategic terms, a concentration of risk.
A purely military forward base—smaller, cheaper, harder, stripped of the commercial superstructure that makes it a target—would have served the stated military purpose at a fraction of the ecological and financial cost. The choice not to build that simpler thing, and to build this complex hybrid instead, requires explanation.
Whose war is India preparing for?
The sinking of the IRIS Dena clarified the Indian Ocean’s new reality in a way that years of strategy documents had not. A US Navy submarine, operating in waters where India considers itself the pre-eminent power, destroyed a warship that had been moored at an Indian naval exercise weeks earlier. Eighty Iranian sailors died. India issued no statement of consequence. Iranian vessels docked at Kochi for engine repairs under the rubric of humanitarian assistance. The government walked its tightrope with skill.
But the tightrope itself is the problem. India’s energy relationship with Iran is real—tens of billions of dollars in crude imports before sanctions tightened them. India’s energy relationship with the Gulf states is existential—no overland alternative exists. And now India is accelerating the construction of a base explicitly designed to threaten the Malacca Strait, which China’s energy imports must transit, at a moment when the Indian Ocean has become an active theatre of US-Iran warfare.
Bloomberg reported in February 2026 that the Great Nicobar expansion would “help the US, Japan, and Australia counter China.” Chinese media described it as “India helping America confront China, turning the situation into four against one.” Both characterisations, from opposing sides, arrive at the same conclusion: the primary beneficiary of this base is the United States.
India bears the ecological destruction, the tribal displacement, the fiscal burden, and the security vulnerability. The United States gains a forward chokepoint outpost without spending a dollar or losing a single sailor. The Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement—signed in 2016—means US naval vessels can access Indian facilities for fuel and repairs. A commercial port run by an Indian private firm provides exactly the kind of plausible deniability that makes such access politically convenient for both sides.
This is not strategic autonomy. This is strategic subcontracting.
What India actually needs
India’s real energy security crisis is upstream, not downstream, of the Malacca Strait. It lies in the absence of the TAPI pipeline, in the collapse of the IPI pipeline under American pressure, in the forty per cent of crude that moves through a strait now intermittently at war. No amount of surveillance at the Six Degree Channel addresses the fact that India cannot receive a cubic metre of Turkmen gas overland, or that its energy diplomacy has been so thoroughly subordinated to American geopolitical preferences that it cannot build a pipeline through a neighbouring country without Washington’s permission.
A scaled-down, purely military forward operating base on Great Nicobar—hardened, sparse, focused on maritime domain awareness—would cost a fraction of the current project and serve the legitimate military goal without the ecological carnage, the tribal dispossession, the cronyist commercial overlay, or the exposure to the charge of serving as America’s eastern sentinel.
The ex-servicemen families deserve compensation at par with what the state pays when it wants land for purposes it values. The Shompen deserve a consent process that takes longer than three weeks. The forests deserve an accounting that does not treat seven hundred thousand trees as an acceptable line item in a project that is commercially underwater from day one.
Great Nicobar is a real place, inhabited by real people, covered in forests that took millennia to grow. The government’s urgency, its invocation of strategic necessity, its opacity on commercial details, its haste on tribal consent, and its generosity with public funds and stinginess with compensation all point in the same direction: this project is moving fast because it cannot bear close examination.
India has strategic interests in the eastern Indian Ocean. It also has obligations—to its veterans, to its tribes, to its forests, and to a tradition of foreign policy that does not define the national interest as whatever Washington finds convenient. The case for a military presence in the Nicobars is real. The case for this project, as designed, is not.
