New Delhi: The mega infrastructure project planned for the Great Nicobar Island will endanger the Nicobar long-tailed macaque population present there and “gradually wreck its entire ecosystem”, the Association of Indian Primatologists (AIP) has cautioned.This is due in part to the extent of deforestation and changes in land use that the project could entail, it said.“It is clear,” the AIP said on Monday (March 17), “that this mega project is indifferent towards the natural ecosystem, and if executed, will endanger an already ‘Vulnerable’ macaque and gradually wreck its entire ecosystem”.It added: “We are bound by morality and ethics to state that we can no longer remain a mute spectator and be a party to the brutalities to be inflicted upon the island and the species thereof. We stand in absolute opposition to the Great Nicobar Project.”While the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History or SACON, which functions as the ‘South India Centre’ of the Wildlife Institute of India, has prepared a conservation and management plan for the macaque, the AIP said that no such plan “is capable of mitigating the large-scale deforestation and land use alterations purported by the project”.There are two reasons for this, as per the AIP. First, the felling of trees in connection with the project will increase heat and humidity on the island, which the macaques “exhibit an incapability to tolerate”.Second, deforestation combined with the effects of climate change will diminish the macaque’s natural food resources and habitat, thereby bringing it into further conflict with humans.Letter by Association of Indian Primatologists by The Wire on Scribd“A land use change of such a massive scale” as the project will bring about could also cause the macaque’s “contributions to the ecosystem” to be lost and threaten plant and animal species that are linked with it, the AIP added.At any rate, the Union environment ministry has denied the particulars of SACON’s conservation plan under section 8.1(a) of the RTI Act, the AIP said.Section 8.1(a) exempts the disclosure of information that would affect India’s sovereignty or integrity, its “security, strategic, scientific or economic interests”, its diplomatic relations or that would lead to the “incitement of an offence”.Besides, there is much that is not known about the macaque – such as its population density and dynamics, its ecological relationship with its habitat and its immunology – and it would be impossible to acquire enough of this information to prepare a conservation plan in the the two years the SACON had asked for, the AIP further said.In the absence of long-term and comprehensive research on the macaque’s unique features “on an island that is equally unique”, a conservation plan could be reduced to a “hollow procedural exercise”, said the AIP.Its X page describes it as an “association by early career researchers (non-faculty) from India to further primatology research and conservation”.Among the infrastructure projects proposed for the island are an international transshipment terminal and port, a greenfield airport, a power plant as well as a township.Numerous experts have raised concerns about how these projects will affect the indigenous Shompen and Nicobarese tribes and the biodiversity on the island (including the loss of lakhs of rainforest trees; some estimates have pegged the potential loss of trees at up to one crore).
