Development that Destroys

Development has been one of the many mantras that drives the Modi governance. Like quite a few of Modi’s mantras, development has wreaked its share of decimation in many parts of the country. The latest is a Rs72,000 crore project in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The latest issue of Frontline magazine features on its cover the fatal development that is being exported to the islands from Indraprastha. All the information in this post has been taken from Frontline. I have just converted the long articles in the magazine into capsules for a quick read. For details, please go to the magazine.

Before we look at what is being planned for Andaman & Nicobar, let us remind ourselves of what has happened to Joshimath, the threshold to the Abode of Gods. Development killed that small hill town. Development has extracted similar disastrous prices from many other places such as the coastal areas, Vizhinjam being the latest. People like Arundhati Roy have written copiously about the catastrophes brought about by various development projects. Millions of people have been displaced by various development projects in India. Before Modi, the figure was on the wrong side of fifty million. Just absorb that figure. That is ten times the population of countries like New Zealand. After Modi, no one is sure of how many millions get displaced from where all? The entire tribal population of Andaman & Nicobar will be the latest victims. And they won’t be displaced in all likelihood; they will be decimated.

I promised to give the data in the form of capsules. Let me stick to that promise. Below are the capsules.

·      Total budget for the development of Andaman & Nicobar: Rs72,000 crore

·      What’s going to come up: a trans-shipment project (like the one in Vizhinjam), an international airport, a power plant, a greenfield township on 160 square kilometres (of which 130 sqkm are forests now), industries, resorts, etc.

·      Hilarious irony: the main project is named ‘Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island’

·      The total area of the island where the project is coming up: 900 sqkm. Out of that 850 sqkm is designated as tribal reserve. But development in India has never cared for the indigenous people. You can imagine what’s going to happen to these tribal people of the island.

·      The whole island where the project is coming up was declared a biosphere reserve in 1989 and included in UNESCO’s Man & Biosphere Programme in 2013. All that will vanish from the new re-written history of the country.

·       300,000 people will be brought to the islands for completing the project that will take about 30 years.

·      130.75 sqkm of pristine forests will be decimated. These forests form the rainforest ecosystem of the region. A million trees will vanish from the face of the earth in a few days of ‘development’.

·      Many animal species will be totally endangered if not driven to extinction. The Galathea Bay area, where the port is to be built, is the habitat of giant leatherback turtles, world’s largest marine turtle. Many other species like long-tailed macaque and fiddler crab which are peculiar to Nicobar are likely to vanish from the face of the earth.

·      Even the tribal people are likely to disappear. There are just about 1,000 Nicobarese and 200 Shompen there. The Shompen are already a vulnerable tribe, being totally dependent on forests as hunter-gatherers. 

A Shompen [From Frontline]

When will we learn the most vital lessons from Joshimath and other such places that our craze for development has destroyed? One of the many emblems of the Modi-type of development is the world’s tallest statue: Statue of Unity. Kothie is one of the villages that vanished to make space for the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Had that village existed, the whole of it could have been accommodated in the big toe of Sardar Patel’s Statue. That is a memorable metaphor for our development. Let me leave you with that image at the risk of sounding antinational.