Claim That 81% of Great Nicobar Island Will Stay Forested After the Airport Project Is Misleading on Two Counts

The claim is that the airport project on Great Nicobar Island will leave 81% of the island forested, implying a modest ecological footprint. The verdict is partially false. The arithmetic behind the number is real, but it is misattributed and ecologically incomplete in ways that matter enormously.

Here is where the figure actually comes from. According to ANIIDCO project documents and the 2022 Environmental Impact Assessment, the total direct forest diversion approved for the entire holistic development project — covering a transshipment port, township, power plant, and airport together — is approximately 130.75 sq km. Subtract that from the island's roughly 884 sq km and you get about 83–86% nominally untouched, which proponents rounded to the reassuring headline of 81% forested. The MoEFCC Stage I Forest Clearance granted in November 2022 confirms this 130.75 sq km figure. The arithmetic is not fabricated.

The first problem is attribution. The 81% figure is routinely presented as if it describes the airport's footprint specifically. It does not. It describes the cumulative direct clearance of the entire multi-infrastructure project. Pinning the residual-forest statistic to the airport alone makes the individual component appear far less impactful than the combined development it is part of.

The second and more serious problem is ecological. A forest is not a parking lot; you cannot remove 16–19% of a contiguous tropical rainforest and leave the rest biologically intact. The Wildlife Institute of India, in its rapid assessment cited in MoEFCC proceedings, flagged that the project area overlaps with critical habitat for leatherback sea turtles and the Nicobar megapode, and that edge effects and fragmentation will degrade forest quality well beyond the 130.75 sq km directly cleared. The Bombay Natural History Society formally told the MoEFCC Expert Appraisal Committee that the 81% figure was derived from direct footprint only, with no landscape-level connectivity or species-area relationship modelling. Pankaj Sekhsaria and co-authors, writing in Current Science in 2023, argued that Great Nicobar's forest is a fragmentation-sensitive ecosystem where even 16–19% clearance causes disproportionate biodiversity loss. Legal analysts at LIFE further noted that road networks, utility corridors, and induced development will affect additional forest cover entirely absent from the headline statistic.

To be fair to the proponents: the number is not invented. ANIIDCO's own documents show the calculation, and the MoEFCC clearance is a matter of public record. If the only question were whether a majority of the island's land area avoids direct bulldozing, the answer is yes. That concession, however, is precisely the manipulation — using a narrow, arithmetically clean metric to stand in for a complex ecological reality it cannot capture.

The pattern here is a classic footprint fallacy: measure only what is physically cleared, ignore everything that happens to the surrounding ecosystem, and present the residual percentage as a conservation credential. Watch for it whenever a large infrastructure project in a biodiversity-sensitive area leads with a 'percentage of habitat retained' figure without citing fragmentation modelling or species-area analysis. If those are absent, the reassuring number is doing more rhetorical work than scientific work.