At a time when corals around the world are facing unprecedented threats from climate change, India’s plans to translocate big coral colonies in the Nicobar Islands for a mega development project has come under severe criticism.
A comprehensive plan to translocate the corals—as suggested by the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI)—enabled the project to get a go-ahead from the National Green Tribunal (NGT). Clearing the Rs 92,000-crore Great Nicobar project in February 2026, the tribunal upheld the environmental clearance that includes the translocation of 16,150 coral colonies.
“Successful coral reef restoration has previously been accomplished by the ZSI in Gulf of Kachchh and the transplanted corals had >90% survival and effectively transformed into a functional coral reef,” the government body under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had stated in the NGT.
The ZSI added that it had conducted a study and submitted the report before the high-powered committee. In the study, "no corals were found in the proposed site for the construction of the port and other amenities in Galathea Bay," and the said 16,150 coral colonies are "found within 15 meters depth in proximity of the project."
The tribunal deemed that the plan by the ZSI had sufficient safeguards to give the mega port and township project a green light. However, Dr Bryan Wilson, a renowned coral biologist and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, disagrees.
In an exclusive interview with The Quint, Dr Wilson said the plan to translocate corals in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands—and the assumption that the environment will be exactly the same—is nothing short of "scientific madness".
Questioning the claims made by ZSI, especially the survival rate of corals translocated in the Gulf of Kutch on the western coast of India, Dr Wilson said,
“I have to be honest...I haven't found any data showing how successful that translocation was," adding that that was also 16,000 corals, and I don't know if that's just an arbitrary figure that has been brought about to translocate a reef system."
'Not All Species of Corals Translocate Well'
Dr Wilson has worked for over two decades on coral reef systems around the world. He also serves as the key scientific advisor to the Chagos Conservation Trust located in the Indian Ocean. Further, he specialises in studying the resilience and recovery of coral reef systems to human activities with a sharp focus on climate change.
He explained,
"Now, there are some species that do translocate very well. And these are typically ones of the Acropora species—a fairly resilient species—sometimes referred to as a weedy species. They do very well. But coral reefs are not just one genera. In this particular region, [there are] maybe upwards of 50 or 60 genera. And these all cope very, very differently with environment disturbances."
The main concern, said Dr Wilson, is the simplistic way of viewing coral reefs.
"Corals produce essentially the 3D structure of a reef, the buildings in which the inhabitants will live, survive, feed, breed, and all of those things... To lift just one aspect of this reef structure, this incredibly complex reef structure, and move it, and [then to] suggest that that environment will be exactly the same as it was originally is, scientifically, I would say madness," he opined.
So, even as some corals do survive translocation, it won't be an entire reef system.
Talking about "successful" translocations in other parts of the world, he said, “They've achieved success with a subsection, a fraction of that original natural coral reef system."
'No Independent Body to Check ZSI's Claims'
Dr Wilson further questioned whether any independent scientific authority had, in fact, verified the claim made by the ZSI in the tribunal that their previous translocations had resulted in a greater than 90 percent survival rate.
"The big issue that I think as a scientist, as a researcher, that I'm really concerned about is that there has been no independent fact-checking of what the ZSI says is. It truly baffles me," he noted.
“I'm baffled by the fact that people still think that we can do this to the environment—and can produce, to use an old term, I suppose, a facsimile copy of a wonderful dynamic environment in place of one that already exists.”Dr Bryan Wilson
Dr Wilson further said that the impact of the mega development project in a unique, biodiversity-rich area, as the Nicobar Islands, would impact not just the corals, but also the ecosystems dependent on them.
“It's going to have a catastrophic impact on the reefs around these islands. And I think of places like the beaches where, of course, leatherback turtles are found to nest and the seagrass meadows that these turtles depend upon. These will all be irreversibly impacted by a development of this scale on this coastline”.
The Quint has reached out to the ZSI for their response on Dr Bryan Wilson's assertions. The article will be updated as and when they respond.
Watch the full interview for more.