Experts say it would be hard to assess numbers of Sentinelese without causing them alarm and figures would be inaccurate anyway
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s India gears up for its next national census in 2027, officials in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean are confronting the thorny question of how to count Indigenous people who strongly resist contact with the outside world.
At the heart of the dilemma are the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe living on the thickly forested North Sentinel Island, who have a long history of repelling intruders using bows and arrows. Now, a government census notice is stirring debate about whether attempts should be made to count them at all.
“Trying to do a census of the Sentinelese is pointless,” says Manish Chandi, a former member of the research advisory board of the Andaman and Nicobar Tribal Research and Training Institute. “It’s far more important to protect the island’s reef, marine resources and the tribe’s isolation than to come up with a number,” he told the Hindustan Times.
