‘They should choose their own destinies’: Manish Chandi on India’s isolated tribes

Manish Chandi, a longtime researcher on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, describes the North Sentinel and Great Nicobar tribal reserves as among the richest biodiversity zones in India, sustained precisely because they were never opened to timber extraction or settlement.

He details how the Sentinelese, Shompen, and other groups forage, fish, and hunt within reserves whose boundaries have held since the mid-20th century, while outside fishers and trawlers erode buffer waters and a large development project in Great Nicobar overlaps directly with Shompen foraging lands.

Chandi argues that government and public misunderstanding casts self-sufficient communities as primitive and in need of rescue, a framing he says produces dependence on state supplies rather than protecting the independence tribes already have.

He points to denotification attempts and tourism or business proposals as the latest version of a pattern in which isolated communities lose land under the banner of helping them.

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