Isolated and contacted Indigenous tribes in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands face threats from illegal fishing, mega-development projects and misinformed government welfare policies that undermine their self-sufficiency, says Manish Chandi, a former research scholar who has spent decades working with tribal communities in the region.
Chandi worked with the communities while he was with the Andaman Nicobar Environment Team and the Nature Conservation Foundation. He is also a former advisory board member of the Tribal Research Institute under the Andaman and Nicobar Administration. In an interview with Mongabay’s Latoya Abulu, Chandi says that protecting Indigenous autonomy is vital for both tribal survival and environmental conservation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie southeast of mainland India.
The archipelago’s tribal reserves — home to Indigenous groups that live in voluntary isolation, such as the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island and the Shompen of Great Nicobar Island — contain some of the region’s richest biodiversity, outperforming the roughly 100 official national parks and wildlife sanctuaries across the islands, Chandi says.
This is because the tribal reserved areas are both large and “have not been used for timber extraction and settlement and therefore retain the biodiversity of both various habitats and also species,” Chandi tells Mongabay.
However, several escalating pressures threaten these communities.
Chandi notes that commercial trawlers and poachers frequently infiltrate coastal buffer zones, harvesting sharks, lobsters and turtles that island communities depend on for subsistence. On Great Nicobar Island, a government-proposed development project directly overlaps with ancestral foraging grounds and the Shompen’s habitations without their consent.
Overall, there is ignorance about the communities as well, Chandi says.
Some government officials, for example, view traditional hunting-and-gathering practices as “primitive”, and have replaced food that communities grow themselves with external food sources, he says. This has increased communities’ dependence on foods that they cannot grow or gather themselves.
Chandi adds that substituting natural self-sufficiency with dependence on government welfare supplies from the market, forces once-independent communities into small, sedentary reservations, opening their larger traditional territories to denotification, whereby formal land rights can be revoked, and commercial tourism.
“Autonomy and self-sufficiency are critical indicators of human welfare and well-being,” Chandi says. “Rather than creating dependencies and imposing our ignorance on their community interests, welfare plans for tribal communities should incorporate these perspectives.”
Chandi adds that the establishment’s reluctance to make “ethically positive and scientifically genuine efforts to understand the tribal communities and to share that information with the island settlers is a festering wound that needs serious attention.”
“There’s so much to learn of the Indigenous communities, to comprehend their space and perspectives their world and ours, and to share that with others,” he says.
Read the full interview with Manish Chandi here.
Banner image: Fishermen from South Andaman lay gillnets around North Sentinel Island, exploiting the rich fishery. This picture is from 1999. The exploitation of marine resources has only increased, Manish Chandi says. Image courtesy of Manish Chandi.
