New Delhi, Sep 8: Terming the Great Nicobar infrastructure project a “planned misadventure”, Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi on Monday said it poses an existential danger to the island’s indigenous tribal communities and is being insensitively pushed through, making a “mockery of all legal and deliberative processes”.

The collective conscience cannot, and must not, stay silent when the very survival of the Shompen and Nicobarese tribes is at stake, Sonia Gandhi said in an article published in ‘The Hindu’.

“Our commitment to future generations cannot permit this large-scale destruction of a most unique ecosystem. We must raise our voice against this travesty of justice and this betrayal of our national values,” she said in her article titled ‘The making of an ecological disaster in the Nicobar’.

Her remarks come days after Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi wrote to Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram, expressing deep concern over the alleged violation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in the grant of clearances to the Great Nicobar Project, and urged the government to ensure adherence to the due process prescribed under the law.

Congress leader and former environment minister Jairam Ramesh has also been highlighting concerns over the Great Nicobar project, claiming that it is inimical to ecology and the rights of forest dwellers and tribals in the area.

In her article, Sonia Gandhi hit out at the Modi government and said there has been no shortage of “half-baked and ill-conceived policymaking” in the last 11 years.

“The latest in this series of planned misadventures is the Great Nicobar mega-infrastructure project. The totally misplaced Rs 72,000 crore expenditure poses an existential danger to the island’s indigenous tribal communities, threatens one of the world’s most unique flora and fauna ecosystems and is highly susceptible to natural disasters,” she said.

“Nevertheless, it is being insensitively pushed through, making a mockery of all legal and deliberative processes,” Sonia Gandhi said.

She pointed out that the Great Nicobar Island is home to two indigenous communities, the Nicobarese tribe and the Shompen tribe, a particularly vulnerable tribal group.

“The ancestral villages of the Nicobarese tribals fall in the project’s proposed land area. The Nicobarese were forced to evacuate their villages during the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. This project will now permanently displace this community, ending its dream of returning to its ancestral villages,” she said.

“The Shompen face an even greater threat. The Island’s Shompen Policy, notified by the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs, specifically requires the authorities to prioritise the tribe’s welfare and ‘integrity’ when considering ‘large-scale development proposals’.

“Instead, the project denotifies a significant part of the Shompen tribal reserve, destroys the forest ecosystems where the Shompen live, and will cause a large-scale influx of people and tourists on the island,” she argued.

Ultimately, the Shompen will find themselves cut off from their ancestral lands and unable to sustain their social and economic existence, Sonia Gandhi said.

Yet, the government is stubbornly adamant and shockingly insistent, she added.

Sonia Gandhi alleged that the constitutional and statutory bodies set up to preserve tribal rights have been sidestepped throughout this process.

“As in Article 338-A of the Constitution, the Government should have consulted the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes. It has failed to do so.

“The Government should have consulted the Tribal Council of Great Nicobar and Little Nicobar Island. Instead, the Council Chairman’s plea that the Nicobarese tribals be allowed to return to their ancestral villages has been neglected,” she pointed out.

Sonia Gandhi further said that the letter of no objection was secured from the Council, but it has since been revoked, with the Council noting that the authorities had “rushed them” into signing the letter.

“The Forest Rights Act (2006), which empowers the Shompen as the authority to protect, preserve, regulate and manage the forests, should have underpinned any policy action. Instead, the Shompen have not been consulted on this issue — a fact which the Tribal Council has now confirmed,” she said in the article.

“The country’s laws are being mocked wholesale. Unconscionably, one of the country’s most vulnerable groups may have to pay the ultimate price for it,” she asserted.

“Ecologically, this project is nothing short of an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. The project will require the cutting down of trees on an estimated 15% of the island’s land, decimating a nationally and globally unique rainforest ecosystem,” she pointed out.

The Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change estimates that 8.5 lakh trees may be cut, Sonia Gandhi said.

“This is a depressing figure, but it may also be a gross underestimate — independent estimates have suggested that 32 lakh trees to 58 lakh trees may eventually be cut,” she said.

The government’s solution to this indiscriminate tree felling is that of “compensatory afforestation”, a rather poor substitute for the loss of natural, old-growth forests, she opined.

“Despite abundant evidence confirming the same, which includes a National Green Tribunal order, the Government has contrived ways to manipulate this truth through a high-powered committee (HPC). The report of this HPC and the ground-truthing exercise it conducted to reclassify the port site out of CRZ 1A has not been made public,” she said.

Sonia Gandhi further argued that from a wildlife standpoint too, the project raises serious concerns.

“Primatologists have written to the Government expressing grave concerns about the project’s impact on the Nicobar long-tailed macaque. These concerns have been ignored,” she said.

The biodiversity assessments for the projects have come under questioning for critical methodological flaws, Sonia Gandhi said.

“The assessment of sea turtle nesting sites was conducted in the off-season for nesting. Drones were employed to gauge the project’s impact on dugongs, but these drones have limited capacity and can only assess shallow areas,” she said.

Finally, the project, including the port, is coming up in a seismically sensitive earthquake-prone zone, she pointed out.

Locating such a massive project here deliberately jeopardises investment, infrastructure, people and the ecology, Sonia Gandhi added.

Sharing Sonia Gandhi’s article on X, Rahul Gandhi said, “Through this article, Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Smt. Sonia Gandhi highlights the injustices inflicted on Nicobar’s people and its delicate ecosystem by this project.” The project, titled ‘Holistic Development of Great Nicobar’, involves the construction of a transhipment port, an international airport, a township and a power plant spanning more than 160 sq km. (PTI)

New Delhi, Sep 6: In a gesture underscoring the spirit of cooperative federalism, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has written to finance ministers of all states, expressing gratitude for their support and active role in helping implement the landmark overhaul of the goods and services tax (GST) regime.

In an interview with PTI, Sitharaman said states made their view on the proposal to rejig tax rates but ultimately agreed that it was for the benefit of the common man, an argument that helped reach a unanimous decision at the GST Council meeting earlier this week.

The overhaul, which will from September 22 see rates of a wide swath of products — from butter to chocolates and shampoos to tractors and air conditioners — come down, was agreed at a meeting of the GST Council on September 3.

The panel is headed by Sitharaman and includes representatives of all states and Union Territories.

“Yesterday, I have written a letter to each finance minister thanking them, saying, you can have any number of intense discussion and argument, but finally, the Council rose to the occasion and gave relief to the people of India, to all people of India. And, I am grateful for that gesture. So, I wrote that letter,” she said.

She said the work at the Council was truly “remarkable”.

Despite apprehensions over loss of revenue from classifying most products into categories: 5 per cent for common use goods and 18 per cent for everything else, and doing away with 12 and 28 per cent slabs, the GST Council took a unanimous decision for the GST rejig.

The panel was to meet for two days starting September 3 to discuss the proposal made by the Centre but ended up approving it on the very first day after a marathon daylong meeting.

“So the sense of the house was, this is a proposal which is going to undoubtedly benefit the common man. There is no point in standing against it… Ultimately everybody came together for a good cause, and I’m truly very grateful,” Sitharaman said.

The minister said states were always in favour of rate reduction and their only concern was with regard to their revenue implications post-tax cuts.

“I even appealed to them, saying, for the sake of the people of India, Please. It’s not just the states. It’s even the Centre that is going to get affected by the reduction. But we’ll make up for it because once the rates come down, people are going to come out to buy, and that will take care of it (revenue impact). That’s how consensus was arrived at,” she said.

Sitharaman, speaking at a press conference following the GST Council meeting, had expressed her gratitude to the states for their cooperation and collaborative efforts in implementing one of India’s most significant tax reforms.

On Saturday, she noted that the Council had given a patient hearing to every comment and suggestion put forward by its members.

“All points were thoroughly deliberated before arriving at a consensus,” she said.

She also highlighted the inclusive nature of the discussions, adding that several ministers who wished to speak again after their initial points had already been debated were given the opportunity to do so.

“Their additional inputs were heard and taken into account,” the Finance Minister emphasised. She also credited states for their constructive participation in the GST Council and their commitment to driving tax reform. (Agencies)

 MUMBAI, Sept 6: Mumbai police have arrested a 50-year-old man from Noida for allegedly sending a threat message claiming 14 terrorists had entered the city with 400 kilograms of RDX to carry out blasts, an official said on Saturday.

The crime branch apprehended the accused, Ashwinikumar Supra, from his residence in Sector 79 of Noida, Uttar Pradesh, within 24 hours of receiving the threat message, he said.

The message was received on the traffic police’s WhatsApp helpline on Thursday, in which the sender had claimed that 14 terrorists had entered the city with human bombs and 400 kgs of RDX and planted it in 34 vehicles to blow up the city, the official said.

The city police were on alert, as the threat was issued while they were making security arrangements for Anant Chaturdashi, the 10th day of the Ganesh festival.

A case was registered at the Worli police station, and the crime branch took over the probe, he said.

The crime branch traced the sender’s mobile phone number to Gautam Buddha Nagar, following which a police team travelled to Noida and apprehended the accused, the official said.

The arrested accused is being brought to Mumbai and will be produced before the court, later in the day, he added.

The motive behind the hoax threat is yet to be ascertained, police said. (PTI)