New Delhi, Apr 24 (EFE).- A controversial construction project on India’s Great Nicobar Island could lead to the extinction of an isolated hunter-gatherer community living there, a group of experts on Indigenous peoples has warned.
These experts have penned a letter to the government urging the abandonment of the Great Nicobar Development Project, which seeks to metamorphose the remote island into the “Hong Kong of India.”
“If this project is not scrapped, the Andaman and Nicobar administration and the government of India will be knowingly subjecting the indigenous communities of the Great Nicobar Island to irreversible damage, which will in due course lead to their extinction,” they warned.
The $9 billion port project for the Indian Ocean island inhabited by 8,000 people entails an international shipping terminal, airport, power plant, military base, industrial park, and tourism zones.
Spread across more than 244 square km, including 130 square km of rainforest, the mega project plans to accommodate 650,000 settlers on the island, a staggering population increase of nearly 8,000 percent, according to the global Indigenous rights group Survival International.
The government asserts that it will compensate for the forest lost by planting new trees in the scrublands of north India, Survival International noted in a statement.
The nonprofit said the Shompen tribe, one of the most isolated communities on Earth, would bear the brunt of the project, which is feared to obliterate vast areas of their unique rainforest habitat.
“Four Shompen communities, along with their southern hunting and foraging grounds, will be devastated by the project. Their sacred river system will also be ruined. This will in turn destroy their pandanus trees, one of their most important sources of food,” Survival said.
“With their rivers ruined, the Shompen’s ability to survive and entire way of life will face collapse.”
The plea to halt the project comes on the heels of a similar recent warning from 39 international genocide scholars to the Indian government.
Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, remarked the Shompen and other uncontacted tribes would “not survive the catastrophic transformation” of their island.“No national development project can justify a genocide.” EFE
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