When Maps Erase People: How India’s Great Nicobar Megaproject Overlooks Tribal Lands

One Map, and a Systemic Blind Spot

For more than two decades, the only detailed map identifying tribal settlements and land use on Great Nicobar has been one prepared between 2000 and 2004 by an independent researcher working with the Andaman Nicobar Environment Team (ANET), later updated after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This map identifies villages, forest-use zones, and shared spaces belonging to both the Nicobarese and the Shompen.

Local administrators have relied on this map informally—particularly during emergencies—to locate tribal communities and understand their distribution across the island. After the tsunami, rescue and relief operations depended heavily on such anthropological knowledge. Officials explicitly sought it out to identify affected settlements, estimate population displacement, and plan rehabilitation colonies such as Rajiv Nagar, where many Nicobarese families were resettled.

Yet this knowledge was never institutionalised. As the emergency phase receded and long-term development planning took precedence, reliance on detailed tribal mapping faded. What had been indispensable during crisis became dispensable during growth planning.

Today, officials across the local administration, the Nicobar Forest Division, and the Directorate of Tribal Welfare reportedly do not possess systematic maps marking tribal villages or foraging grounds. Even national institutions acknowledge this absence. The Anthropological Survey of India, including its Andaman and Nicobar regional centre, does not maintain a map delineating Shompen or Nicobarese territories on Great Nicobar. Anthropologists at the Andaman Nicobar Tribal Research Institute describe the state’s approach as one that relies on vague descriptors—such as “upper road Shompen” or “lower road Shompen”—many of which no longer correspond to physical reality after the tsunami washed away roads and landmarks.

This reflects not an absence of information, but a failure of administrative memory. Indigenous geography is recognised when lives must be saved, but sidelined when land must be acquired.

Mapping as Power in Development Planning

The Great Nicobar case exposes a deeper structural pattern in Indian development governance. Planning systems are built around cadastral maps, survey numbers, and digitised land records—tools designed for fixed plots, exclusive ownership, and revenue administration. Indigenous land use rarely conforms to this logic. It is often communal, seasonal, and ecologically embedded, organised around shared access to forests, coastlines, and inland ecosystems rather than bounded possession.

When planning institutions privilege only what fits these cadastral templates, they shape outcomes long before any ground is broken. Land that can be plotted becomes governable and acquirable; land used in customary, non-linear ways is treated as vacant or underutilised. What cannot be rendered legible within administrative systems cannot be defended within them. Development outcomes are determined less by social reality than by the limits of what the state’s maps are designed to see.

Environmental Clearance Without Social Geography

This cartographic bias is mirrored in regulatory processes. Environmental clearance mechanisms in India are often technically detailed in ecological terms. Project documents meticulously map forest cover, wildlife habitats, coastal regulation zones, protected areas, and biodiversity hotspots, often down to the hectare.

Social geography, particularly in tribal regions, is treated far more abstractly. Project feasibility reports and environment clearance submissions for the Great Nicobar megaproject identify national parks, forest reserves, and revenue villages, but do not mark tribal settlements, shared-use forests, or hunting and foraging grounds. The environment is rendered visible in high resolution; human presence is flattened or omitted.

Clearances can then proceed by addressing ecological mitigation—such as wildlife management or compensatory afforestation—while sidestepping a granular assessment of displacement, livelihood loss, and cultural disruption. Regulatory compliance is achieved, but it remains socially incomplete.

When Law Cannot See the Shompen

The Shompen community illustrates the limits of this framework with particular force. As a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer people, their relationship to land is fluid and seasonal, shaped by forest ecology rather than permanent villages or surveyed plots. Legal and administrative systems, however, depend on fixity. Land must be bounded, named, and recorded to be recognised.

Applied to the Shompen, this requirement produces a persistent blind spot. Hunting routes, forest camps, and foraging zones central to survival rarely appear on official maps—not because they are marginal, but because the system lacks the conceptual tools to register them. Development thus proceeds on the assumption of emptiness, even as it encroaches on spaces densely inhabited in ways the law does not know how to describe.

Why This Matters

The Great Nicobar megaproject reveals how development can advance by erasing people before displacing them. What is not mapped is treated as if it does not exist; what does not exist on paper cannot assert rights in law. For Indigenous communities whose lives are inseparable from land and forest, this administrative invisibility becomes the most consequential form of exclusion.

At stake is more than a single infrastructure project. The episode raises fundamental questions about how India balances strategic ambition with constitutional commitments to tribal protection, and how development decisions are shaped by the limits of administrative vision. Growth may proceed smoothly on maps that are silent. On the ground, those silences translate into lives uprooted, cultures fragmented, and conflicts deferred rather than resolved.