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

By
Debkumar Bhadra

For decades, many regions, located far from India's political and administrative centres, including India’s 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. 

The phrase the minister reached for is borrowed from the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, who coined it in 1966 to describe how geography — not just policy —shaped Australia's economy and psyche, a cost that no amount of ambition could fully erase. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, separated from the mainland by more than a thousand kilometres of sea, it has meant slower governance, delayed infrastructure, thinner healthcare, and a constant sense of arriving last in the national mainstream. 

Over the past decade, that story has visibly changed. A closer look at the islands' transformation reveals both how far connectivity has come and how unevenly that progress has been distributed. 

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 from Chidiyatapu near Sri Vijaya Puram to Ariel Bay in Diglipur. For decades, travel along this stretch meant negotiating ferry bottlenecks and a road that struggled to keep pace with the islands' weather. The National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation has since undertaken its upgrade, including 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 and the under-construction bridge over Middle Strait, once completed, would turn the chain of islands into a continuous all-weather road network. 

The digital transformation is an even more remarkable story. 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 fibre 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 was 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 has been addressed. 

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. 

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. It strengthens human capital while deepening the intellectual and social life of the islands, allowing students to imagine futures without necessarily leaving the islands. 

The Great Nicobar Island Mega Project 

Among the islands’ current undertakings, none is larger in scale or ambition than the Great Nicobar Island 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 rests on a gap in India's own maritime economy. Nearly three-quarters of India's trans-shipped container cargo is currently handled at ports outside the country — chiefly Colombo, Singapore and Port Klang. Every container that takes that detour adds cost and transit time. Galathea Bay's claim for filling that gap rests on geography rather than ambition alone. The site lies barely 40 nautical miles from the east-west shipping route that carries a large share of world container traffic through the Malacca Strait, with a natural water depth exceeding 20 metres — deep enough for the largest container ships to berth. Phase 1, targeted for 2028, is designed for a capacity of roughly 4 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), with later phases envisaging up to 16 million TEUs. Industry estimates built around current freight patterns suggest savings in the range of $200 per container and 3 to 5 days off transit times to Europe and Africa, simply by removing the need for a stopover at Colombo or Singapore.

Also, there is a strategic angle that runs alongside the commercial one. A major Indian deep sea port and a dual-use airport at the mouth of the Malacca Strait — one of the most consequential maritime chokepoints — give India leverage at a point where an increasing share of Indo-Pacific shipping and naval activity converges. Conceived under the Sagar Mala programme launched in 2015, NITI Aayog, the project's planners have made the case that capturing trans-shipment revenue currently lost to foreign ports, and a long-term strategic foothold near a critical sea lane, justifies treating the Great Nicobar Island project as a national priority. I have written about the project's fuller scope and history separately, tracing its lineage back to the islands' earlier industrial era.

The Bridge That Will Truly End the Tyranny of Distance 

Amid all this progress, one unfinished aspiration continues to define public sentiment in South Andaman — the long-pending Chatham-Bambooflat Bridge. 

Even as the broader tyranny of distance that once separated mainland India from these islands gradually recedes, a smaller but more intimate version of the same challenge continues to shape everyday life for residents of rural South Andaman. 

The physical distance between Chatham and Bambooflat is less than a kilometre. Yet for thousands of daily commuters, crossing this narrow stretch of water demands enormous patience and uncertainty. Long ferry queues, limited vessel capacity and congestion at the single-ramp jetties routinely turn what should be a five-minute journey into an hour-long ordeal. It may not be an exaggeration to say, perhaps this one-kilometre crossing is among the slowest daily commuter links anywhere in the country. 

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 announcement generated tremendous hope, given that Shri Gadkari and his ministry are known for executing infrastructure projects with remarkable speed and efficiency. 

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, emphasized the Government’s commitment to strengthening island infrastructure, including bridge connectivity between Bambooflat and Chatham. 

This is the test that matters. The islands found ₹1,511 crore 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. None of that scale of ambition has yet reached a stretch of water that a strong swimmer could cross in minutes. 

The story of modern India under Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi suggests 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 and these islands are themselves proof of it. 

But for the residents of Bambooflat, Ferrargunj, Wimberlygunj, and adjoining rural areas, the tyranny of distance will end in the truest sense when the Chatham–Bambooflat Bridge becomes reality. The bridge 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 journey remains, quite literally, unfinished.

Suggested reading from the blog:

• 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