The Fifteen Minutes You Were Given

You Have Fifteen Minutes to Decide What You Weren't Told About

You are the tribal council member. Officials from the island administration have called a meeting about buffer zones near your settlements - Rajiv Nagar, New Chingenh. The meeting lasts fifteen minutes. You are asked how much buffer area you need. You say you'll need to survey the land first. What you are not told is that, on the very same island, an Expression of Interest for a private data centre is being floated on the bays bordering your buffer zones

• Campbell Bay, Anderson Bay, land already earmarked in the draft master plan for residential pockets and biodiversity tourism, not industrial data infrastructure.

The Genuine Tension **This is not a

story about a government hiding something sinister. The administration's own officials working on the master plan told reporters they were not aware of the data centre discussions either - this may be institutional fragmentation, not deliberate concealment. But intent does not change the effect: a community whose habitat rights are protected under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 was asked to make a fifteen-minute decision about buffer zones without being told what those buffers would actually need to buffer against. Free, Prior and Informed Consent requires all three words to be true simultaneously**

• consent given without being informed of what is actually being decided is not free consent; it is a signature obtained from someone who did not know what they were signing.

Applying FPIC to This Exact Gap FPIC is not

satisfied by holding a meeting. It is satisfied only when the community has the specific information needed to meaningfully evaluate what they are consenting to. Fifteen minutes, spent discussing buffer distances without disclosing the project those buffers exist to accommodate, does not meet that bar - regardless of whether the omission was administrative fragmentation or something less innocent.

The Shompen and Nicobarese were not denied a meeting. They were denied the one piece of information that would have made the meeting meaningful.

The Resolution

The data centre EoI process should be paused specifically in relation to any site bordering Tribal Council consultation areas and a fresh, fully-informed consultation should be held disclosing the data centre proposal explicitly, before any feasibility proposal is evaluated.

This costs something real: delay to a strategic digital infrastructure project India has genuine reasons to want built quickly and to a private-sector process already underway. That cost is worth naming honestly, not minimized.

But an FPIC violation discovered after contracts are signed is far more costly to reverse than a delay before them - and a community's right to know what they are actually consenting to cannot be the variable that gets sacrificed for administrative convenience.