Supreme Court leaves Great Nicobar challenges with the Calcutta High Court

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up the Union government’s challenge to a Calcutta High Court order that let public-interest petitions against the Great Nicobar project proceed. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana said the matter was already pending in the high court, and that the high court should try to hear it on the dates already fixed, 25 and 26 November.

The Centre had argued that the project was of great national importance and that the maintainability of the petitions went to the root of the case. The bench did not accept that as a reason to pull the dispute up. It noted that the high court had already declined to throw the petitions out at the threshold, and it asked the high court to complete pleadings and to hear the cases on the November dates.

What the high court had refused to do

The appeal came from a Calcutta High Court judgment of 6 May. The high court rejected the Centre’s objection to petitions filed by retired IAS officer Meena Gupta. The objection was to her locus, her right to bring the case. The high court let the petitions go forward. The Centre then asked the Supreme Court to intervene. On Monday the Supreme Court declined.

The petitions allege violations of the Forest Rights Act in the way consent was obtained for the project, and they raise environmental objections. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, requires that forest rights be settled and that consent be taken before forest land is diverted for a project of this kind. The petitioners say that step was not done lawfully. The high court has not ruled on that claim. It has ruled that the petitions may be heard.

The project on the table

The Great Nicobar project is a cluster, not a single contract. As described in the hearings, it includes an international container transhipment terminal of 14.2 million twenty-foot equivalent units, a greenfield airport sized for 4,000 peak-hour passengers, a 450 MVA power plant mixing gas and solar, and a township. The site is Great Nicobar, the southernmost island of the Andaman and Nicobar group, close to the Malacca approaches.

The government’s case for the terminal is location. A port at that point on the map would sit on the east-west shipping lane in a way no mainland Indian port does. The petitioners’ case is the island itself: forest, the Shompen and Nicobarese communities, and a seismic coast. Those two descriptions have been in public argument for several years. Monday’s order does not choose between them. It chooses the court that will hear the consent question first.

A calendar, not a clearance

The practical result is a date. Pleadings in the other connected matters are to be completed, and the high court is to try to hear the cases on 25 and 26 November. The Supreme Court did not stay the project. It also did not clear it. A refusal to entertain the Centre’s maintainability appeal means the high court’s May order stands, and the petitions remain alive.

For the ministries running the terminal, the airport and the power plant, the November dates are the next legal gate on the forest-rights objection. Work that does not depend on the high court can continue only to the extent existing permissions allow. Work that the petitions say was authorised without lawful consent stays under that cloud until the high court rules.

Meena Gupta’s standing was the point the Centre wanted decided in Delhi. The Supreme Court has left that, and the merits, in Kolkata. The next document that changes the project’s legal position will be a high court order after the November hearing, not a line from the Monday bench.