New Delhi: Senior Congress leader and former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh said on June 3 that the government’s insistence about the adequacy of the environmental impact assessment report (EIA) it had commissioned to institutes under it for the Great Nicobar Project amounted to a “perversion of due process”. Ramesh was responding to Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav’s letter dated May 27 in which Yadav claimed that the impact assessment studies for the Rs 92,000 crore infrastructure projects on Great Nicobar island – which has raised numerous concerns from several quarters – were adequate as they used “historical data”, along with single season surveys.Primary vs secondary dataThe studies mentioned by Yadav in his letter are not based on primary data collected over a single seasonal cycle, but on data collected only over a few weeks, said Ramesh, in his response on June 3.While Yadav highlighted in his latest letter to Ramesh that the impact assessment reports put together by several institutions under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change were also based on historical data sets collected by these institutes, such secondary data “is just not a substitute for primary data collection and project-specific studies”, Ramesh said.“You are very aware of the difference between primary data collected at the project site and its impact areas and secondary data collected from pre-existing studies,” his letter read.While Yadav said that the judgments of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) dated April 3, 2023 and February 16, 2026, had already looked into these concerns and cleared them, this is not true, Ramesh’s letter pointed out. For instance, Paragraph 33 of the judgment dated April 3, 2023, “expressly records that there are “unanswered deficiencies” in the environmental clearance issued to the project and proceeds to list three, including the need for a comprehensive EIA and remanded the clearance for re-examination”, Ramesh said.“A perversion of due process”The 2026 judgment of the NGT records the submissions of the Ministry on the erosion status of Galathea Bay, and the report of the ISRO’s Space Applications Centre has clearly marked stretches of the eastern flank of Galathea Bay in red, indicating erosion, he said.“You will recall that under the Island Coastal Zone Regulation, 2019, ports are prohibited in “high” erosion stretches and comprehensive EIA study is necessary in “low and medium” erosion stretches. Given the fact that ISRO’s report has marked erosion along Galathea Bay’s shoreline, is it not prudent to conduct comprehensive EIA studies over three seasons to account for seasonal variations,” Ramesh asked in his letter to Yadav.In his letter to Ramesh on May 27, Yadav had written that the shoreline change assessment carried out by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management – an institute under the aegis of the Union environment ministry – using six time-series satellite datasets over a 17-year period had found that the eastern flank of Galathea Bay “is predominantly stable”, and therefore did not require a comprehensive three-season study.The 2026 NGT judgment also “does not contain any finding on the adequacy of the data collection and EIA studies as claimed in your reply”, Ramesh pointed out. “It is truly extraordinary and even unprecedented that those who have prepared the EIA report and other studies and those who have had them prepared have ended up reviewing their own work and found it to be fine. This is a perversion of due process,” he wrote.In violation of ministry’s own mandatesThe short EIA for the projects proposed on Great Nicobar Island is also in violation of the Union environment ministry’s own mandates, Ramesh added. The Ministry’s 2009 Office Memorandum mandates that all port projects in the Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep Islands require comprehensive environment impact assessments including physical and mathematical modeling and ground verification, Ramesh said.“You write that conditions have been imposed to safeguard biodiversity. These conditions are actually irrelevant in determining whether adequate studies and assessments have been conducted prior to clearance. Clearly, that has not been done,” he said.Ramesh also pointed out that the report of the High-Powered Committee tasked to look into the matter was submitted in a sealed cover to the NGT in October 2025. If the records leading to the clearance for the project are in the public domain, as are the master plan for the township and the detailed project report for the airport, why is the re-examination of the clearance process confidential, Ramesh asked.‘Sudden shift in narrative’The narrative on the Great Nicobar Island Project has “suddenly shifted”, Ramesh wrote in his letter.“Faced with incontrovertible evidence of its hugely adverse ecological impacts, the Union Government is now emphasising its supposed strategic rationale…The Great Nicobar Island Project as presently conceived is overwhelmingly a commercial enterprise. I am sure you are well aware of the unique biodiversity of Great Nicobar, some of which is known, some of which is only gradually being revealed and some of which is still not known and requires deeper field investigations. All this is being endangered now. Many habitats and species will get destroyed even before we are able to inventory them,” Ramesh wrote.He added that India’s strategic objectives will be better met by expanding INS Baaz located in Campbell Bell on Great Nicobar, and expanding other assets of the Andaman and Nicobar Command across that archipelago, as defence experts too have recommended. Ramesh also added that he had written about this to the Union home minister in a separate letter.