NEW DELHI: The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in India is threatening the endangered ethnic groups of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, officials and rights groups confirm.
The federally administered Andaman and Nicobar Islands with a population of 400,000 are an archipelago of 572 islands off the coast of southern India. They are home to five endangered tribes — the Jarawas, North Sentinelese, Great Andamanese, Onge and Shompen — that inhabit the archipelago’s more remote islands. More than 3,000 coronavirus cases and 50 related deaths have been recorded in the archipelago.
“While conducting COVID-19 tests, some Great Andamanese have tested positive with mild symptoms or asymptomatic, of whom three have recovered,” the Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration said in a statement to Arab News on Friday, without revealing the total number of coronavirus cases.
Media reports indicate that 13 people from the group categorized by the central government as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) have been infected. According to official data, there remain only 56 members of the Great Andamanese tribe.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands were turned into a prison under British colonial rule in the 19th century. According to Survival International, a rights group working for indigenous and tribal people, when the British settlers arrived in 1858, there were more than 5,000 Great Andamanese living in the islands. Hundreds of them were killed as they tried to defend their territory while many more were wiped out by outbreaks of diseases brought from the mainland by the British.
According to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration statement, the authorities had earlier moved the Great Andamanese to the Strait Island reserve to protect them from the coronavirus by preventing contact with the non-indigenous population. Local commentators, however, expressed doubt in the measures undertaken by the administration.
“If all of the Great Andamanese were shifted to the Strait Island then how did the infection spread there?” said Denis Giles, the editor of Andaman Chronicle, an English-language daily based in Port Blair, the archipelago’s capital. “The infection could have spread through the health workers working with the Great Andamanese. There are reports that five welfare workers working with the Jarawa tribe got infected last month.”
“If 13 in the population of 50-plus are infected, that means more than 20 percent of the population is infected. These are not ordinary people, they are really endangered and very vulnerable to any kind of disease from the outside world. They have not been exposed to the outside world at all.”
Goa-based anthropologist Manish Chandi, whose research of two decades has been focused on the Andaman Nicobar tribes, fears the local government’s inadequate response may destroy the whole tribal population. “It can affect and exterminate the entire population if it is not looked after,” he said, “The Great Andamanese have a population of 50-plus, the Jarwa are 450 people, and they can easily get infected. Once they get infected, their immunity level for such diseases is extremely poor. They are in severe danger.”
