Pankaj Sheksaria must be counted as one of our foremost creative scientific and ecological writer in India. he is consistently been profiling and writing on the Andaman & Nicobar islands since two decades (at least as far as I can remember), both as a columnist in the HINDU and also through the Kalpavriksh network.
The Nicobar Island stands like an after thought appendage to Indian on the other side of equator, the beauty of the land, unfortunately has been presented in the mainland for all the wrong reasons - tourism primarily and security concerns later on. I had been to Campbell Bay almost two decades ago and was struck by the insensitive take over by the administration far away from the mainland with its own local ruling situation. The original natives who lived in the island from time immemorial are reduced to being incidental attraction. It was Pankaj who had earlier brought to light the entire havoc tourism was causing to the island and it is his curating of these articles of probably the largest ecologically disastrous project that any Government of India has ever attempted being played out (I don't know if the Himalayan road / dam project against which protesting Prof. Agarwal gave up his life is bigger than this in the disaster scale) in the Nicobar today.
The Nicobar development project as a betrayal being captures through these set of articles are divided into a neat grouping like an obituary sequence. First the project outlined with all its glaring gaps and mistakes, then the ecological void that this will create, the relations to the deceases (in this case the tribals), and finally the legal issues. In this short compilation painfully you get to understand how the idea of the Nicobar island is being assassinated to resurrect another idea of India or Bharat that is secure, prosperous and busy. The tribals here like everywhere in the country as the primary stewards of the land are reduced to marginal stakeholders, evaluated based on the value of the land they need to be compensated for and not on the relationship and knowledge they had on the land. In one of the articles there is an insightful statement by the tribal leader to the local representative that they land belonged to them since the time of God. But, God himself being reduced to a political transaction today has little to prevail over and save the island that is being destroyed on our watch. Someday collectively the descendents of the current political - bureaucratic - scientific nincompoops who have wrecked this havoc, will have to pay for this. Maybe the island or the ocean will then take its revenge.