The Great Nicobar Betrayal

Description

Dreams of mega development herald disaster for a highly vulnerable island. Great Nicobar Island is the southernmost and largest landmass in the chain that makes up the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. A Rs.72,000 crore project that is planned for the development of this island will result in ultimately destroying both the island's delicate rainforest ecosystem and its indigenous people.In The Great Nicobar Betrayal, Pankaj Sekhsaria, one of the best known chroniclers of contemporary issues in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has compiled articles written by various experts across publications that examine the proposed project from every angle-environmental, geological, impact on local communities, law, due process, and ecology. These pieces together shed light on the magnitude of the disaster that will be unleashed on this pristine place if the project comes through.The book is a warning and a catalog of the manmade catastrophe that lurks on the horizon, one that will destroy more than the tsunami of December 2004 ever did.PANKAJ SEKHSARIAPankaj Sekhsaria is a member of the environmental action group, Kalpavriksh where he works on issues of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and also edits the bi-monthly newsletter, the Protected Area Update. He is a freelance journalist, photographer and author, most recently, of 'Islands in flux - the Andaman and Nicobar Story' (HarperCollins India 2017) and 'The Last Wave – an island novel' (HarperCollins India 2014). He has authored/edited three other, non-fiction books, two of which are based in the A&N Islands He graduated as a mechanical engineer from the Pune University in 1993 and followed this with a Master’s Degree in Mass Communication from the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi, in 1998. He was awarded a doctorate in 2016 in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Maastricht University, Netherlands, for his thesis ‘Enculturing Innovation – Indian engagements with nanotechnology’. The thesis investigates scientific research and innovation practices in five nanotechnology laboratories in India and explores the societal and cultural influences on research and on innovation inside the laboratory. He is currently Senior Project Scientist, DST-Centre for Policy Research, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Delhi