Ruben Nag
India’s journey toward supply-chain independence has always had a strange blind spot: the sea. For a country that stretches across 7,500 kilometres of coastline, far too much of its cargo still makes a courtesy call to someone else’s port.
A recent technical paper on Nicobar’s bunkering potential puts numbers to something everyone quietly knew — India has been sailing past its own advantage for decades. And when the government finally acknowledged the dormant potential of the islands in its official announcement, it wasn’t a revelation; it was an overdue admission. The real inflection point came earlier, when the Andamans were reimagined not as a distant archipelago but as an unclaimed economic orbit. The early blueprint from NITI Aayog treated the islands the way companies treat underperforming assets — underutilised, badly positioned in national priorities, yet sitting on a geography the world would kill for. Subsequent legal assessments, like those unpacked in policy analyses, merely confirmed what the map had always implied: India had left strategic value lying on the table.
Only when the plans for Galathea Bay surfaced did the conversation finally shift from “what if” to “why not.” Commentaries, including economic retrospectives, compared the scale to global mega-ports, while strategic columns such as naval-focused reports pointed out that its proximity to chokepoints wasn’t a coincidence it was the whole point. But the most important shift wasn’t in the analysis; it was in the attitude. As one sharp economic review in a national commentary observed indirectly, India has finally stopped looking at the Andamans as an obligation and started looking at them as leverage. That psychological shift matters more than any feasibility report. Sometimes, a nation doesn’t gain power by expanding outward — it gains power by noticing what was always under its feet.
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