Great Nicobar project: Jairam Ramesh flags non-transparency in latest letter to Environment Minister

Published 19 June 2026 · politics

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Friday (June 19, 2026) wrote to Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav over the Great Nicobar Island project, flagging the issue of

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Friday (June 19, 2026) wrote to Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav over the Great Nicobar Island project, flagging the issue of non-transparency and asserting that the environmental impact assessments of different aspects of the venture are "demonstrably inadequate". Ramesh's latest missive comes in the backdrop of a series of letter exchanges between him and Mr. Yadav on the project over the last couple of years. "Many thanks for your response, howsoever disappointing and unsatisfactory, of June 13, 2026 to my letter of June 3, 2026. I am sorry to say yet again that the environmental impact assessments of different aspects of the Great Nicobar Island Project are demonstrably inadequate and fall woefully short of guidelines set by the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change itself," the former Environment Minister said in his latest letter to Mr. Yadav. Ramesh pointed out that these had been detailed in his earlier letters to which Mr. Yadav had "no worthwhile answer". ‘Environmental clearance granted prematurely’ "Your position is that conditions made part of the environmental clearance mandate continuous monitoring. In this connection, may I submit the following for your consideration. Si monthly compliance reports are to be made public. But after March 2024 no such compliance report has been made available.

Minutes of the project monitoring committee meetings are being uploaded several months after they have been held," Mr. Ramesh said. The environmental clearance calls for conservation and mitigation plans to be submitted within 15 days after the clearance was granted on November 11, 2022, but these plans also are not publicly available, he said. These include the plans to be prepared by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology. (SACON), the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), the Botanical Survey of India (BSI), the Institute of Oceanography (NIO), the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM) and the Andaman and Nicobar Forest Department (ANFD), Mr. Ramesh said. "Some of these institutions had been asked to submit revised proposals for monitoring and mitigation plans after incorporating suggestions made by the Environmental Appraisal Committee. These plans too are not publicly available," the Congress leader said. Moreover, it is strange, to say the least, that such plans may have been submitted after appraisal by the committee concerned, raising doubts about their adequacy and reliability, Mr. Ramesh argued. He pointed out that the updated Environment Management Plan based on existing and additional studies is not publicly available. "There are at least, as far as I have been able to make out, twelve such studies by different institutions.