India’s isolated island tribes need autonomy to survive rising threats, says scholar

Manish Chandi, a researcher who spent decades working with Indigenous communities in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, says isolated tribes like the Sentinelese and Shompen face mounting threats from illegal trawling, a government-backed Great Nicobar development project overlapping Shompen land without consent, and welfare policies that replace self-gathered food with market supplies. He says the tribal reserves, left unlogged and unsettled, now outperform the region's roughly 100 official parks and sanctuaries on biodiversity.

Chandi argues that government officials who view traditional hunting-and-gathering as 'primitive' have fostered dependence on outside food sources, pushing once-independent communities into smaller, sedentary reservations whose vacated land becomes available for denotification and tourism. He calls for welfare planning that incorporates tribal perspectives rather than imposing outside assumptions, describing the lack of genuine effort to understand these communities as a 'festering wound.'

The full dispatch is available from the source below.