Transformation of Andaman and Nicobar Islands
Breaking the Tyranny of Distance: How twelve years
of connectivity, infrastructure and institutional expansion brought India’s
farthest islands closer to the national mainstream
Debkumar Bhadra
For decades, many regions, located far from India's political and administrative centres, including North Eastern States and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, quietly lived under what Hon'ble Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Minority Affairs Shri Kiren Rijiju described as the "tyranny of distance," speaking at the Andaman Ideas Summit 2026, organised by The Wave Andaman, at Sri Vijaya Puram (earlier Port Blair) on the evening of June 20. I watched him say it live on YouTube, from thousands of kilometres away in Nagpur. That I could watch it in real time is itself a telling marker of how far the islands have come. A live broadcast out of Sri Vijaya Puram, watched anywhere in the country as it happened, would have been a near impossibility before the Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar Island (CANI) submarine optical fibre cable came into operation.
This article traces the story of A&N Islands' transformation, sector by sector, during the past decade and asks how far it has truly reached.
Roads, Bridges, Airport, and Internet: The Connectivity Revolution
The
clearest evidence of change is visible on National Highway 4 — the 333 km Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) from Chidiyatapu near Sri Vijaya
Puram to Ariel Bay in Diglipur. For decades, travel along this stretch meant
negotiating two ferry crossings and a road battered by heavy rainfall. The
National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation has since
undertaken its upgrade, including the construction of two major bridges, at a
sanctioned cost of roughly ₹1,511 crore. A journey that once meant
multi-day sea voyages can now be completed end to end in 10 to 12 hours. The Azad
Hind Fauj setu over Homfray’s Strait between Uttara and Gandhi Ghat has already
removed one of the two ferry crossings on ATR. Once the under-construction bridge over Middle Strait is completed, the fragmented chain of islands will
turn into a continuous all-weather road network, with journey time reduced further
by an hour or two.
The digital transformation is an even more remarkable. Before August 2020, the islands' entire internet capacity served by satellite connectivity was a combined bandwidth of just 3.2 Gbps for the whole archipelago — barely the requirement of a mid-sized mainland office building. The Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar Island (CANI) submarine optical fiber cable, laid over 2,300 km at a cost of about ₹1,224 crore, changed that scenario entirely: Sri Vijaya Puram now draws on a bandwidth of up to 400 Gbps, more than a hundredfold increase, with onward links of up to 200 Gbps reaching outer islands including Car Nicobar, Kamorta and Great Nicobar. For a population that had spent years budgeting its internet use the way one budgets diesel during a power cut, that scale-up has reshaped education, telemedicine and small business in ways statistics cannot fully capture.
The aviation sector tells a similar before-and-after story. The new integrated terminal at Veer Savarkar International Airport, opened in 2023 at a cost of around ₹710 crore, can handle roughly 1,200 passengers at peak hour — more than three times the old terminal's capacity — and is designed for an annual throughput of 50 lakh passengers. Whatever one's view of how tourism in the islands ought to be managed, the bottleneck that for years made Sri Vijaya Puram’s airport a hindrance appears to have been addressed of late.
Transformation of Islands Higher Education
Higher education tells a parallel story of overdue arrival. For generations, an islander's ambition to study medicine, engineering, or law meant boarding a flight or a ship to the mainland. The setting up of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Institute of Medical Sciences (ANIIMS), Dr B.R. Ambedkar Institute of Technology (DBRAIT), Andaman College (ANCOL), Andaman Law College, and — most significantly — the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Institute of Higher Learning (NSCBIHL) as the islands' first locally administered deemed-to-be-university, finally gives that ambition a local address. Island students can now imagine professional futures without necessarily leaving the islands.
Welfare Delivery, Expansion of the Developmental State
The islands' transformation has not been limited to
roads, bridges and airport alone. Equally significant has
been the expansion and targeted delivery of central sector welfare schemes, urban renewal, and public services.
Under the Smart City Mission, Sri Vijaya Puram has seen the redevelopment of Marina Park–Flag Point stretch and the Marine Esplanade project, the Green Connect corridor linking Joggers Park and Gandhi Park, and the induction of more than 20 electric buses into the city's transport fleet.
Other central schemes - the Jal Jeevan Mission, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana and the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, MUDRA scheme, Ayushman Bharat–PM Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) extended welfare delivery, financial inclusion and healthcare access across the islands.
The islands have also become an unlikely frontier for renewable energy. Against a peak electricity demand of around 80 MW, islands now have nearly 29 MW of installed solar capacity — a marked shift for a territory that was once entirely dependent on diesel. The 20 MW solar plant at Dolly Gunj–Attampahad in South Andaman alone supplies nearly a quarter of peak demand, and together with hydro power and rooftop solar, renewables now account for more than a quarter of the islands' installed generation capacity.
The Great Nicobar Island Mega Project
Among the
islands’ current undertakings, none is larger in scale or ambition than the Great Nicobar Island (GNI) project — a ₹81,000-crore
plan for an International Container Trans-shipment Terminal (ICTT) at Galathea
Bay, alongside a dual-use civil-military greenfield international airport, a
power plant, and a township, to be developed over three phases through the
coming decade.
The
project seeks to address the fact that, despite being one of the world’s largest
trading economies and handling enormous volumes of container cargo, India still
lacks a major international deep-sea trans-shipment port. As a result, nearly
three-quarters of India’s trans-shipped containers are first shipped to foreign
ports, chiefly Colombo, Singapore, and
Port Klang, before being loaded onto larger mother vessels for onward journeys
to Europe, Africa, and East Asia. Every such detour adds cost and transit time.
The
case for GNI rests fundamentally on its geography rather than ambition alone. Galathea
Bay lies just 40 nautical miles from the Malacca Strait – one of the busiest
maritime corridors in the world, through which a substantial share of global
container traffic passes. Equally important, the site possesses a natural depth
exceeding 20 metres, making it suitable for a true deep-sea port.
Industry
estimates based on current freight patterns suggest the mega project could
save nearly $200 per container and reduce the transit time by 3 to 5 days, by
eliminating the need for stopover at foreign ports.
But the case of the GNI project is not purely economic. At the mouth
of the Malacca Strait, where global shipping routes are increasingly
intersecting with strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific region,
infrastructure becomes an instrument of strategic importance. A major
Indian deep-sea port and dual-use airport in Great Nicobar would give India a
permanent presence at one of the world’s most consequential maritime
chokepoints, strengthening both commercial reach and strategic leverage for the
country. I have written about the project's scope and history separately, tracing its lineage back
to the islands' earlier industrial era.
The Bridge That Will Truly End the Tyranny of Distance
The story of modern
India under Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi suggests that geography need
not remain an impediment to development. From the Himalayan regions to the
Northeast and India’s coastal frontiers, infrastructure has steadily become an
instrument of national integration. Amid all these strides, a smaller but intimate
version of the challenge - the inefficient commute between Bambooflat – Chatham,
continues to pinch the residents of rural South Andaman.
The physical distance between Bambooflat and Chatham is about a kilometre. Yet for thousands of daily commuters, crossing this stretch of water demands enormous time, patience, and uncertainty. Long ferry queues, limited frequency, capacity, and congestion at the single-ramp jetties routinely turn what should be a five-minute journey into an hour-long ordeal.
It is not that the government has been silent on the issue. A bridge between Bambooflat and Chatham was first announced on 16 February 2015 by the Union Minister Shri Nitin Gadkari, at a public meeting at Bambooflat Jetty. The expectation deepened when Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, in his historic address from Netaji Stadium in Sri Vijaya Puram on 30 December 2018, reiterated the Government’s commitment to strengthening island infrastructure, including bridge connectivity between Bambooflat and Chatham.
The announcement generated tremendous hope, given that both the Hon’ble Prime Minister and the Union Minister of Road Transport & Highways, under whose ambit the matter falls, are known for executing infrastructure projects with remarkable speed and efficiency. The scale of development these islands have seen over the past decade is proof of it. The A&N Islands saw ₹1,511 crore spent to rebuild 230 km of highway, ₹1,224 crore to lay 2,300 km of undersea cable, ₹710 crore to rebuild an airport terminal, and ₹81,000 crore for the GNI Project.
These are not small numbers, and they deserve to be stated plainly rather than buried under adjectives. The islands have, in measurable ways, moved from the margins of national infrastructure planning toward its centre.
But for the residents of Bambooflat, Ferrargunj, Wimberlygunj, and adjoining rural areas, the tyranny of distance has not receded. They continue to toil through long ferry queues and uncertain schedules, day after day. A ferry service, however well-managed, will always remain at the mercy of weather, tides, and operational constraints. With a growing population and rising number of vehicles, the demand is only expected to intensify. And given the crossing is about a kilometre, deploying additional ferries or expanding jetty infrastructure by adding vehicle ferry ramps is neither practical nor sustainable, indicating a bridge is inevitable in the long run.
The bridge, when built, will not
merely connect two shores. It will connect aspiration with opportunity,
patience with progress, and a long-standing public hope with fulfilment. Until then, the islands'
transformation remains, quite literally, unfinished.
This post was carried in the Sri Vijaya Puram edition of Echo of India dated June 30, 2026
An abridged version of the article carried in The Wave Andaman on July 9, 2026 is available here : https://thewaveandaman.com/bambooflat-chatham-bridge-ending-tyranny-of-distance
Suggested reading from the blog:
- A Curious Case of Selective Implementation & Deviation
- From ATI to Great Nicobar : Development Must Not Leave People Behind
- Transition in A&N Island’s Higher Education Framework Pushes Students into Academic Uncertainty
- An appeal to the visiting Honble Minister of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways
- Inefficient vehicle ferry service between Bambooflat - Chatham; Has the sector hit a roadblock
Comments