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Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Friday alleged that the Modi government has "bulldozed the Great Nicobar Mega Infra Project" and "official maps of the island have been airbrushed to remove corals from the map".
In a post on X, he said that when reality stands in the way of corporate ambition, "the Modi government simply redraws it". "Another day, another revelation of how the Modi Government has bulldozed the Great Nicobar Mega Infra Project through due process. Now we learn that official maps of the island have been airbrushed to remove corals from the map. In the 2020 map of Great Nicobar Island, the island's southern and western coast - including Galathea Bay where the proposed international container transshipment terminal is coming up - were marked as having extensive coral reefs," he said. "By 2021, the revised government map moved these reefs mid-sea where it is biologically impossible for coral reefs to exist. But the shift in the reef's location on the map conveniently paved the way for the mega-project," he added. https://x.com/Jairam_Ramesh/status/1981660661659615632 He said in 2020, the maps showed nearly the entire island as CRZ-IA and this means that the construction of ports is entirely prohibited here. "The 2021 map magically no longer shows Galathea Bay as falling under CRZ-IA. This 're-categorisation' allows the development of the area for the project. This is not an ecological update, but a bureaucratic rewrite to bypass environmental safeguards. When reality stands in the way of corporate ambition, the Modi government simply redraws it," he said. The government had told the Rajya Sabha in November last year that a decision on the proposal involving the development of the Great Nicobar Island project had been taken after due consideration of potential environmental impacts on the island ecology and also taking into account the significant strategic, defence and national importance of the developmental projects. (ANI)
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