Jarawa Tribal Reserve Dossier: New Publication from the Andaman Islands

Dear Friends,
We are very happy to announce the release of a new publication on the
Jarawa Tribal Reserve of the Andaman Islands:

THE JARAWA TRIBAL RESERVE DOSSIER:
Cultural and Biological Diversities in the Andaman Islands

Edited by
PANKAJ SEKHSARIA & VISHVAJIT PANDYA

Prepared by
KALPAVRIKSH
under the
LOCAL AND INDEGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS (LINKS) PROGRAM
of
UNESCO.

No. of Pages: 212; 12 colour plates; 11 colour maps

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SYNOPSIS:

One of the most distinctive, but relatively little known features of the Andaman Islands is an entity of land and sea called the Jarawa Tribal Reserve (JTR) – a space legally notified in the name and, arguably, the interests of the Jarawa tribal community. Until recently, the Jarawa were hostile to outsiders. As a result, those who might otherwise have exploited the resources of the reserve – poachers, settlers and developers – were denied access.

However, the Jarawa have now chosen to cease hostilities, and the borders of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve have become permeable to intrusion, even though legally off limits to outsiders.

The multiple changes that have ensued have enormous ramifications for both the Jarawa people and their lands. As much of the information relating to the Jarawa and the Reserve remains scattered and difficult to access, this Dossier has undertaken to bring together within the covers
of one publication, information and views about the JTR emanating from a number of distinct disciplines.

Indeed, one cannot comprehend the complex interactions between the biological and cultural diversity of this unique people and place without adopting an interdisciplinary perspective.

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The dossier is made up of 10 original or previously published papers:

1) Colonisation and conflict resolution
Manish Chandi

2) Hostile borders on historical landscapes
Vishvajit Pandya

3) Territory and landscape around the Jarawa Reserve
Manish Chandi

4) The Jarawa Reserve: the Last Andaman forest
Manish Chandi & Harry Andrews

5)The Jarawa Tribal Reserve: an important bird area
Bombay Natural History Society

6) The Jarawas and their lands
Anthropological Survey of India

7) Impact assessment around the Jarawa Reserve
Harry Andrews

8) Andaman Trunk Road and the Jarawa situation
Samir Acharya

9) The ATR is like a public thoroughfare through one's private courtyard
Dr RK Bhattacharya

10) Only management of traffic needed on the ATR
Dr SA Awaradi

The dossier also Also contains a comprehensive set of annexures that includes the entire Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation (ANPATR) - 1956; the policy on the Jarawa tribe as approved by the Kolkata High Court, rules of the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti (AAJVS), medical regime for the treatment of Jarawas and a compilation of a conflict incidents involving the Jarawas.

The document also has 11 colour maps that for the first time provides detailed and comprehensive insight into the changes in the Jarawa REserve boundary, vegetation, vegetation density and land cover classification, and location of Jarawa camps within the forests of the
Jarawa Tribal Reserve.

If you are interested in receiving copies of the publication please write to me at psekhsaria@gmail.com

Jpeg versions of the dossier cover a few pages, maps, and photographs can be seen below.

The link to the dossier on UNESCO's document system is the following:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001876/187690E.pdf

thanks
Pankaj Sekhsaria
psekhsaria@gmail.com

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Contents

Animal and Plant Diversities

Annexure VII: List of conflict incidents involving the Jarawas

Map III: Changes in the Jarawa Tribal Reserve Boundary

MapVIb: Land Cover Classification

Back Cover

Vanishing Futures

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/07/26/stories/2009072650120500.htm

The Hindu, July 26, 2009

Vanishing futures

PANKAJ SEKHSARIA

It is a small consolation that the Jarawas have not been wiped out like the great Andamanese.

“Those who forget history,” it is said, “are condemned to repeat it.” What happens, however, when you forget history, but condemn someone else for it? Where does responsibility lie then and, importantly, what happens to those who are so condemned? The chilling answer can be found if we look at the history and the present of the indigenous communities of the Andaman Islands. One word: “extinction”.

Retracing roots

The fate of the Great Andamanese is a classic case in point. In the mid-19th century when the British established the penal settlement in the Andamans, it was estimated that there were at least 5,000 members of the Great Andamanese community that was divided into 10 distinct language and territorial groups. In just a century and a half, the population has come down to a little more than 50; all herded onto the small Strait Island a short distance away from Port Blair.

The damage was mainly done in British times. In his 1899 classic A History of our Relations with the Andamanese, M.V. Portman, the British officer in charge of the Andamanese, describes in a bleak, unnerving record the impact of the 1877 epidemic of measles, the worst to hit the Great Andamanese.

…All the people on Rutland (Island) and Port Campbel are dead, and very few remain in the South Andaman and the Archipelago. The children do not survive in the very few births which do occur, and the present generation may be considered as the last of the aborigines of the Great Andaman…

The story of the Onge of Little Andaman Island is very similar. From nearly 700 in the 1901 census, their number has fallen to about 100 today. While a large part of their 730 sq. km. island home is still called the ‘Onge Tribal Reserve’ the protection is only on paper. The biggest violator, tragically, has been the Indian state that ruthlessly (and illegally) logged the forest home of the Onge for nearly three decades till the Supreme Court put a stop to it in 2002.

From late 1960s onwards, thousands of people from mainland India were sent to Little Andaman Island under a Government of India programme to ‘colonise’ it. From being complete masters of their traditional forests of Little Andaman, the Onges have become outsiders in just four decades. Only the Onge lived on this island in 1965. Today, for every Onge on Little Andaman, there are at least 200 people from outside and the equation is changing even as we read this.

In one of the most bizarre incidents in the islands, eight members of the community died and 16 more were hospitalised after consuming a mysterious liquid that was washed ashore in a jerry can near their Dugong Creek settlement in December 2008. The administration says that the Onge consumed the liquid believing it to be alcohol, but doubts persist. Six months have passed but nothing is known of the liquid or the post mortem reports. Maybe the Onge made a mistake, but the authorities too have shown no urgency in getting to the bottom of the matter. The colonising enterprise has been successful and the annihilated, as we all know, tell no tales. They have no history even.

The story of the Jarawas is complex but follows the same trajectory. Thousands of settlers have been moved into the forests of the Jarawas, huge areas of their traditional forest home turned into agricultural and horticultural fields and the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) constructed through the heart of Jarawa forests. Over decades, the road became the main channel to remove precious timber from these forests and also the main vector in bringing a whole range of vices to the Jarawa: alcohol, tobacco, gutka, reportedly, even sexual exploitation.

The road has even facilitated a new kind of tourism: “Jarawa tourism” where visitors drive down the ATR hoping to ‘see’ the Jarawa, as if they were some kind of living exhibits in an open air museum. Traffic continues to ply on the road in spite of clear Supreme Court orders in 2002 to close it down. Two epidemics of measles have already hit the Jarawa in the last decade. It can only be a small consolation that they were not wiped out like the Great Andamanese a little more than a century ago.

Disappearing race

I recently heard a fascinating presentation on the language of the Great Andamanese by Dr. Anvita Abbi, Professor of Linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. It showed new ways of how the world can be perceived, of a different understanding of the universe, of an experience of life and creation, which is as fascinating as it is strikingly original. The calamity struck when the presenter informed that only four of the original Great Andamanese languages are still spoken and, tragically, only six people live who can still speak the language of their ancestors That day I also learnt something else that was new — the first thing that dies when a language dies are the songs of a people!

When the non-profit organisation Terralingua mapped the distribution of languages against a map of the world’s biodiversity, it found that the places with the highest concentration of plants and animals, such as the Amazon Basin and the island of New Guinea, were also where people spoke the most languages. There is a deeper link between culture, language and biodiversity than we seem to know. Nothing will remain if these people and their cultures are exterminated.

Extinction is not only for the plants, the animals, the birds and the bees. It is also what humans to do other humans and in what they do to themselves as well. Every extinction, be it in the world of the wild or of something human is the loss of a part of our very own.

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For related stories

Andaman's Tribal Reserves

On renaming of islands in the Andaman and Nicobar

Traffic triples on highway that threatens Jarawa tribe

http://www.survival-international.org/news/3037

© Salomé">

A Jarawa man and boy by the side of the Andamans Trunk Road © Salomé

The Andaman Trunk Road, which the Indian Supreme Court ruled must be closed six years ago because it threatens the Jarawa tribe, has seen a threefold increase in traffic since 2001.

The highway runs through the land of the 300-strong Jarawa, who have only had contact with outsiders since 1998. The Supreme Court ordered the local authorities on the Andaman Islands to close the road in 2002, but they have kept it open in violation of the order, and have tried to get the order revoked.

According to the local authorities, the figure for vehicular traffic on the road was 17,315 in 2001, and rose to 37,505 in 2006. There were 27,674 vehicles travelling the road in only the first seven months of 2007.

Survival and local organisations have campaigned for many years for the closure of the road, warning that it brings settlers and poachers who steal the tribe’s game, introduce alcohol, and expose them to disease. Last year, the UN urged the Indian government to implement the Supreme Court order and close the road.

Survival’s director Stephen Corry said today, ‘As more and more people travel through the heart of the Jarawa’s land, the threat to their survival becomes ever more severe. If the Indian government is serious about preventing the extinction of yet another tribe, it must close the road.’

For further information contact Miriam Ross on (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or email mr@survival-international.org

Trouble Down this road

The Hindu, June 10, 2007
MEENA GUPTA
The Andaman Trunk Road, a boon for settlers on the island, could be the death-knell for the Jarawas. But little is being done to protect the Stone Age tribe from contact with the 21st century.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/06/10/stories/2007061050090100.htm

THE deprivation of a name, the loss of a homeland, the extinction of a tribe — this seems to be the ominous progression of one of the oldest extant hunter-gatherer tribes in India, indeed, possibly, in the whole world. ‘Ang’ is what they call themselves, but the world knows them as the Jarawa, the Palaeolithic tribe that lives deep in the jungles of the Andaman Islands. The word ‘Jarawa’, in the language of the Great Andamanese (another Stone Age tribe of the Andamans) means ‘the stranger’ or ‘the outsider’. To the Andamanese, the Jarawa were outsiders; a different people, albeit of the same Negrito stock and inhabiting the same islands. It is unfortunate that this name — rather than Ang meaning ‘humans’, which the Jarawa use for themselves — should become the name by which we know them.

TOTAL ISOLATION
The Jarawa are one of the five Stone Age tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which have lived in almost total isolation in the dense tropical forests of the islands, and have survived virtually unchanged up to modern times. They are hunter-gatherers, who do not practise even rudimentary agriculture, wear no clothes, shun contact with outsiders, and are fiercely independent. Their physical appearance — dark, almost ebony skin, closely curled woolly hair, and negrito features — are quite distinct from the population that originates from the Indian mainland and mark them as a race apart. Because of their small numbers (240 persons as per the 2001 census, 317 persons as reported by the Andaman administration in 2007) and their being nomadic deep forest dwellers, they are virtually unknown as a community to the rest of India and are only a name even to the inhabitants of the islands. The plight of the Jarawa has, in recent years, generated a lot of interest because of an almost sudden change in their behaviour in the late 1990s — from avoiding all contact with the outsider to actively seeking such contact. This change, which began in 1997, has heightened their vulnerability and threatened their way of life. The single activity that has had the most significant, and adverse, impact on the lives of the Jarawa is the construction of the Andaman Trunk Road. Running in a south-north direction from Port Blair, the administrative headquarters in South Andaman to Maya Bunder in the north, the ATR was started in 1958 with the very laudable intention of linking Port Blair with the several settlements scattered in the middle and north of the Andaman Islands. These settlements, which consisted entirely of people who migrated from the mainland (refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan, other people who had migrated in search of better opportunities, descendants of convicts and jailors brought by the British) were either consciously established by the administration or, more rarely, had sprung up on their own. Established at great human and financial cost, they are now flourishing habitations, with the people conscious and vociferous about their rights. Before the construction of the Andaman Trunk Road, these habitations were connected to Port Blair (and to the mainland) only by sea routes. With the completion of the ATR (an endeavour that took approximately 40 years), a direct and unimaginably convenient land link was established between the settlements and Port Blair. The trouble was that the ATR sliced right through territory that was, until then, the exclusive and undisturbed preserve of the Stone Age, hunter-gatherer Jarawa tribe. In fact it was because this territory was, by and large, undisturbed that the Jarawa had been able to survive with their way of life almost unchanged over centuries. The incursion into their territory, through the means of the ATR, exposed them to modern civilisation and its baneful influences like tobacco, alcohol, unfamiliar foods and diseases against which they had no immunity, which could together take them to the brink of extinction. What was a boon for the settlers, therefore, could very easily sound the death knell for the Jarawa.Alarm bells about the impact of the ATR on the Jarawa should have started ringing long ago. When the road first started, sensibilities about the environment and human rights and the different rights of tribals were low. Therefore creating a road through someone else’s homeland, destroying virgin forests was not a matter of great concern.

OPPOSITION
But over the 40 years or so it took to construct the ATR, consciousness of environmental issues and human rights has grown by leaps and bounds. However when the rights of a tiny group of people clashes with those of a much larger one, it is usually the more clamorous and stronger voice that is heard. And that is what has happened in the case of the ATR. There was certainly no dearth of opposition from the Jarawa. Starting with the killing of the labourers building the road, to shooting with bow and arrows at buses and other vehicles when they started to ply on the road, the Jarawa made their objection to the violation of their homeland and space quite clear. That the administration continued with their efforts could be seen as an act of valour and determination in the face of odds or callousness and insensitivity towards the rights of weaker people depending on the point of view. The Jarawa became the subject of a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Calcutta High Court in the 1990s with the High Court issuing an order to frame a policy for the Jarawa. The Jarawa Policy was prepared as a consequence, in consultation with a number of experts, and was adopted on December 21, 2004. The Jarawa Policy dwells not inconsiderably on the ATR and its impact on the Jarawa. It recommends, among other things, that the traffic on the road be restricted to essential purposes (which have been specified) and allowed to move only during restricted hours and in convoys. It repeatedly stresses that all manner of interaction between the Jarawa and the travellers, particularly tourists, be prevented. Very importantly, the policy talks of encouraging and strengthening facilities for travel by boat and ship. The policy also talks of removing encroachments in the Jarawa territory on priority basis, and ensuring that no such encroachment of non-tribals take place.

NO IMPLEMENTATION
In the two and a half years since the Jarawa policy has come into being, little has been done to implement its recommendations, particularly the more difficult ones. In defence of the administration, it must be pointed out that the inaction was not, perhaps, deliberate. The Jarawa policy was adopted on December 21, 2004. Just five days later, on December 26, the devastating tsunami struck the islands. The Jarawa were not affected by the tsunami, so the administration, whose entire attention got diverted to the affected areas, had little time to think of the Jarawa, apart from verifying that they had not suffered any loss. The Jarawa policy has thus remained, by and large unimplemented. No attempt has been made to explore alternate sea routes to link the places that the ATR goes to. Little effort has been made to curtail the number of vehicles plying on the road. The average number of vehicles plying on the ATR annually shows a steep increase from 17,179 in 2001 to 35,798 in 2006. The number is poised to exceed 40,000 in 2007. Convoys of vehicles leave eight times a day from Jirkatang and Middle Strait — the two opposite ends of the portion of the ATR that runs through the Jarawa reserve — with an average of 120 vehicles per day. And despite explicit stipulations of no contact with the Jarawa, vehicles conveniently break down or stop on one pretext or the other on the portion of the road inside the Jarawa reserve to allow tourists to see and sometimes interact with the Jarawa. The subject of the Jarawa was again studied by a sub-group of experts and officials, set up in January, 2006 by the National Advisory Council, to examine inter alia institutional arrangements for protecting the Jarawa and to suggest various measures to ensure greater protection. By January 2006, the Jarawa policy adopted in December 2004 had not had a fair chance at implementation. Just a year had passed, and the tsunami and its aftermath had grabbed all attention and resources. The sub-group studied various aspects including the notified Jarawa policy and its implementation and made several recommendations. Regarding the ATR, it has suggested that the portion that runs through the Jarawa reserve eventually be closed, after alternate arrangements for transportation by sea or air were put in place. This means a further delay since very little action has been taken to explore other arrangements. Unless a firm decision to close the ATR (i.e. the portion inside the Jarawa reserve) is taken, the administration will continue to drag its feet on alternate routes.

OTHER ALTERNATIVES
Despite the Supreme Court having taken such a decision in 2002, the administration has filed a review petition, which is yet to be finalised. It is easily forgotten that before the completion of the ATR (which is fairly recent), sea routes were the only alternative. Even today, for all other islands, e.g. Car Nicobar, Havelock, Great Nicobar, other islands of the Nicobar group, Little Andaman and many others, transportation is only by boat or ship and, very occasionally, by helicopter. Therefore the people living in North and Middle Andaman can hardly claim that they will be specially inconvenienced. Almost all the officials who work or have worked closely with the Jarawa, whether of the Andaman administration or the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti, a registered society set up to look after matters relating to primitive tribes, privately aver that closure of the ATR is essential to reduce contact with the Jarawa and protect them from abrupt induction into the 21st century. However, other officials strongly claim that closure of the ATR, even a portion of it, is impossible since it is a lifeline for the northern settlements. The attitude of these latter officials is understandable, but unsupportable, if one keeps the future of the Jarawa in mind. It is apparent they are thinking not of the Jarawa but of the other inhabitants. For these inhabitants, other alternatives are, or can be, made available. For the Jarawa, who virtually have their backs against the wall, there is no alternative, and time is fast running out.

Traffic on the Andaman Trunk Road inside the Jarawa Reserve. Photo: Pankaj Sekhsaria, 2003

Forgotten Islands

PANKAJ SEKHSARIA
The Times of India, May 24, 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Forgotten_islands/articleshow/2069864.cms

If a certain line of beliefs and historical thinking ('Remembering Kaala Paani', The Times of India, May 7) has its way, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands could well see a monumental shift in their present namescape.The island named after Hugh Rose, the man who finally cornered Rani Laxmi Bai of Jhansi in 1858, could soon be named Laxmi Bai Dweep or maybe Rani Jhansi Dweep. Havelock Island named after the British general who retook Lucknow could well be named Nana Sahib Dweep and the island chain itself should be the Shaheed and Swaraj Islands because that is what Subhas Chandra Bose wanted them to be. The Rani of Jhansi or Nana Sahib may have known little of the islands (or even that they existed) but that surely is of little consequence.

This group of 500 odd islands, scattered in an arc in the Bay of Bengal, is certainly fertile territory for a massive, even lip-smacking renaming exercise - Tatiya Tope, Mangal Pandey, Subhas Chandra Bose, Veer Savarkar... the list is endless; one's imagination the only limitation and why not - reclamation of one's history, after all, is believed to be one of the most important and effective tools of nation building. There is one hitch however, a question that renaming enthusiasts might want to first consider - How does one reclaim what was never yours in the first place?

The A&N islands, located far away from mainland India (roughly 1,200 km from Chennai) can only be considered a gift the British left India when the empire disintegrated. There are undeniable connections of India's freedom movement with the islands best symbolised by the revolt of 1857 and the Cellular Jail. There can be no denying that and neither can one deny the close bonds that a large section of the country feels with these islands, but all put together this history does not go beyond 150 years. We might want to rename Havelock Island in the memory of Nana Sahib, but is it not worth asking whether the island that is today called Havelock had some earlier name too?

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands have been the traditional home of a number of aboriginal commu-nities - the Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese (in the Andamans), the Nicobaris and the Shompen (in the Nicobars) that have been living here for nearly 50,000 years. The 150 years that we want to claim now is like the blink of an eye in comparison. Injustices have been done and continue to be done to these communities in a manner that has few parallels in India.Their lands have been taken, their forests converted to plywood and agricultural plantations, and the fabric of their societies so violently torn apart that extinction looms on the horizon for many of them. The Great Andamanese, who were at least 5,000 individuals when the 1857 uprising happened, are today less than 40 people. The Onge who were counted at about 600 in the 1901 census are only a 100 people today. There are critical issues of survival that these communities are faced with problems that are complex and will be difficult to resolve. If indeed there is energy and interest in doing something in the islands and for the islanders these are lines that we need to be thinking on.

These are people, like indigenous peoples everywhere, who have their own histories, their own societies, and yes, their own names for the islands and places. First the British called them something else and now we want to call them something else again. If indeed the places have to be renamed, should not an effort first be made to find out what the original people had first named them, why they were so named, what their significance was and which names are still in use by them. Should that not be the work of scholarship and historical studies? It would be a far more challenging and worthwhile exercise, and perhaps not a very difficult one either, because a lot of information does already exist. If the real and complete history of the islands is ever written, the British would not be more than a page and India could only be a paragraph. How's that for a perspective and a context?

Questions about a road

The Andaman Trunk Road runs through forests inhabited by Jarawas violating Supreme Court orders. PANKAJ SEKHSARIA traverses an increasingly busy road.

Down To Earth, May 31, 2007

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/full6.asp?foldername=20070531&filename=news&sec_id=50&sid=26

A 1998 photo of the barrier on the ATR at Jirkatang

Five years ago on May 7, 2002— the Supreme Court passed a set of landmark orders for the protection of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands’ unique ecosystem. Besides the fragile ecology of the islands, the orders were also meant to protect its tribal communities, which are slowly being pushed to the brink.

The orders included, among others, a direction to stop all timber exports from the islands’ tropical forests, restrictions on sand mining on the islands’ beaches, the creation of an inner-line regime to regulate the influx of people into the islands from the mainland, shutting down of the Andaman and Nicobar Forest Plantation and Development Corporation, which had illegally logged forests set aside for the tribal communities, and the closure of the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) that runs through the heart of the forests of the Jarawas—one of the tribal groups native to the islands.

IMPUNITY
Much traffic has moved down this road since then and the message that comes across loud and clear from the islands is that no one really cares if the Supreme Court orders are implemented. Since the order, the islands have had four chief secretaries, three lieutenant-governors and two members of parliament, and each of them has shown that Supreme Court orders are not for him to implement. There have also been many entreaties on behalf of the islanders in these five years: many petitions have been sent to New Delhi and Port Blair. Various committees of the government—including the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee (cec), another expert committee created by the Calcutta High Court and most recently, one that was formed by the National Advisory Council, with Jairam Ramesh and Syeda Hameed as co-chairs—have pointed out that the islands’ administration continues to violate orders of the Supreme Court. The response of the local administration? Continued indifference. The ATR continues to be open, bringing in a huge set of disastrous influences on the Jarawas.

What the ATR brings to the Jarawas

This is a series of pictures taken on the ATR in February 2003 showing the driver of a passenger bus handing out biscuits to a young Jarawa woman on the part of the road that runs through the Jarawa Tribal Reserve and which has been ordered shut by the Supreme Court in May 2002

KISS OF DEATH

When construction of the ATR began in the late 1960, Jarawas had opposed it violently. It is alleged that in retaliation, camps of construction workers were fortified with high voltage wires and many Jarawas were electrocuted. As work on the road progressed, more of the Jarawa’s forests became accessible for settlements, agricultural fields and horticultural plantations. It brought in people from the outside and took out thousands of cubic metres of tropical evergreen forests, forests that the Jarawa needed for survival. For the Jarawa, the road only brought the kiss of death. The small community has been hit by an epidemic of measles twice in the last seven years. The first, in 1999, affected roughly 60 per cent of their total population of 300-odd individuals. The second epidemic happened about a year ago when a significant portion of the population had to be hospitalised. There are innumerable examples of forest-dwelling communities from around the world that have been annihilated by diseases like measles, which might be common in the outside world. The Jarawas could be the latest on that long list.Disease is just one of the miseries that ATR brings. The others include alien food, intoxicants and, reportedly, even sexual exploitation. atr has also facilitated the rise of a pernicious endeavour, perversely called ‘Jarawa Tourism’. Tourists visiting the islands are being openly solicited with offers of rides along atr and the promise of seeing stone-age tribes.

Traffic on the ATR: A huge line of vehicles (top) waits at the Jirkatang police chowkey before starting on the ATR through the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. Tourists and passenger buses (right) at the jetty on Middle Strait on the Andaman Trunk Road

(both pictures December 2006)

It is often argued that ATR is the sign of the islands’ development and that the political and economic costs of closing it will be too high. It cannot also be denied that thousands of settlers, who use the road today, will be inconvenienced.What we have in the balance therefore is the inconvenience of a few thousands against the very survival of the small Jarawa community, which incidentally has been here for about 50,000 years and should have the first right on the resources and the forests. It should not be a difficult choice to make.

CLOSING REMARKS

There is expert opinion from within India (see below: Expert rejection) and from around the globe that has argued for the closure of the road. This includes the views of researchers, anthropologists, other indigenous communities and various activist organisations. The latest addition to the list is a un report. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination says in its report: “[India] should protect tribes such as the Jarawa against encroachments on their lands and resources by settlers, poachers, private companies or other third parties, and implement the 2002 order of the Indian Supreme Court to close the sections of the Andaman Trunk Road that run through the Jarawa reserve.”The most persuasive argument in favour of closing ATR is encapsulated in an official note written in 2003 by R K Bhattacharya, former director of the Anthropological Survey of India. “The ATR, ”Bhattacharya argued, “is like a public thoroughfare through one’s private courtyard...In the whole of human history the dominant group for their own advantage has always won over the minorities, not always paying attention to ethics. Closing it would perhaps be the first gesture of goodwill from the dominant group towards a group on the verge of extinction.” The issues are various and intensely debated. But is anyone in the administration listening?

EXPERT REJECTION

R K Bhattacharya, Former director, Anthropological Survey of India, and member of the Expert Committee appointed by the Calcutta High Court. In the report submitted to the court in 2003, he says: “…The ATR passes through an area that contains an important aspect of cultural heritage of mankind and this highway disturbs the heritage in probably irreversible ways. We are committed to preservation and maintenance of culture and heritage and the human component of culture...ATR is like a public thoroughfare through one’s private courtyard.”

K B Saxena Former secretary, Union ministry of social justice and empowerment, and member of the Expert Committee appointed by the Calcutta High Court: In the report submitted to the court in 2003, he says:“… the ATR constitutes the single largest threat to the very survival of Jarawas. It has created such enormity of disastrous impact that the future of the Jarawa is in peril. “The traffic on this road and the ease it has provided in approaching the Jarawa territory, as also the Jarawas themselves, has unleashed social and economic forces which have completely sucked the Jarawas into their orbit of exploitation. “It has also become evident that these forces simply cannot be controlled by any regulatory arrangements, however strong, and the closure of ATR…is currently the only way to a sincere beginning of serious efforts to save the Jarawas from sure and early extinction. The closure of ATR is the minimum first step for any measure to protect the Jarawas in the current situation.”

Bhaktawar Singh Former deputy superintendent of police, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and former executive secretary, Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti: “…The Andaman Administration should take immediate steps to save the tribe from extinction. The Andaman Trunk Road should be closed; instead boat service to different parts of the islands should be started.”

Ujwal Mishra, Former superintendent of police, Andaman district: “…Bringing the Jarawas into the mainstream would turn into absolute failure. The administration has met such failures in earlier years. It had taken a pathetically myopic view by building the Andaman Trunk Road, which actually cuts down the available forest sources, including water, for the Jarawas.“It (the administration) failed to stop the locals from entering forests….it failed to stop continuous immigration of settlers into the forests. These early failures continued to relentlessly eat into Jarawas resources like their forests and water resources.”

The writer is author of Troubled Islands Writings on the indigenous peoples and environment of Andaman and Nicobar Islands.