PORT BLAIR — A Union minister has clarified the distinction between development and waste, explaining that felling rainforest for a Rs 72,000-crore island project represents sound economic planning, while a visit to that same rainforest by a critic of the project represents an indulgence costing the public Rs 26 crore.

Addressing a summit, the minister said the opposition's concerns were not genuinely environmental but a "smokescreen" advanced by "external agencies" to obstruct a project of strategic and economic value. As evidence, he cited a scuba-diving visit by the Leader of the Opposition, which he said had cost Rs 26 crore and was undertaken to discredit the project. The figure was offered without itemisation, on the understanding that money spent looking at the sea is inherently more suspect than money spent removing what grows beside it.

The project envisions a transshipment port, an international airport, and a township, and requires diverting some 130 square kilometres of forest and, by the government's own estimate, felling around 9.64 lakh trees, on an island more than four-fifths of which is a biosphere reserve. Officials clarified that these figures described economic activity rather than loss, and were not to be confused with extravagance, a term reserved for the act of going to observe the area before it is cleared.

A spokesperson confirmed the project would proceed on schedule, and that the only documented waste associated with the island remained the Rs 26 crore spent looking at it. The trees, he added, had been accounted for, each counted precisely once.