Is North Sentinel Island Safe .

North Sentinel Island, India

North Sentinel Island, India

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Act of 1956 prohibits travel to the island and any approach closer than five nautical miles ( 9.26 km ) in order to prevent the resident tribespeople from contracting diseases to which they have no immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian navy.

Normally, the island belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In practice, Indian authorities recognise the islanders' desire to be left alone and restrict their role to remote monitoring; they do not prosecute them for killing people. The island is in effect a sovereign area under Indian protection. In 2018, the Government of India excluded 29 island including North Sentinel - From the Restricted Area Permit ( RAP ) regime, until 31 December 2022, in a major effort to boost tourism. In November 2018, however, the government's home ministry stated that the relaxation of the prohibition was intended only to allow researchers and anthropologists, with pre-approved clearance, to visit the Sentinel islands.

The death of an American tourist who illegally visited the isolated North Sentinel Island had drawn the world's attention to the small island's reclusive inhabitants. They are one of the few mostly " uncontacted " groups left in the world, and they owe that isolation partly to geography - North Sentinel is a small island, off the main shipping routes, surrounded by a shallow reef with no natural harbors - partly to protective laws enforced by the Indian government, and partly to their own fierce defense of their home and their privacy. But they are no entirely uncontacted; over the last 200 years, outsiders have visited the island several times, and it often ended badly for both sides. 

North Sentinel Island, India

Who Are The Sentineles? 

According to a 2011 census effort, and based on anthropologists' estimates of how many people the island could support, there are prot somewhere between 80 and 150 people on North Sentinel Island, although it could be as many as 500 or as few as 15. The Sentinelese people are related to other indigenous groups in the Andaman Islands, a chain of Islands in India's Bay of Bengal, but they have been isolated for long enough that other Andaman groups, like the One and the jarawa, can't understand their language.

Based on a single visit to a Sentinelese village in 1967, we know that they live in lean-to huts with slanted roofs; Pandit described a group of hits, built facing one another, with a carefully-tended fire outside each one. We know that they build small, narrow outrigger canoes, which they maneuver with long poles in the relatively shallow, calm waters waters inside the reef. From those canoes, the Sentinelese fish and harvest crabs. They are Hunter gatherers, and if their lifestyle is anything like that of related Andamanese peoples, they probably live on fruits and tubers that grow wild on the island, eggs from seagulls or turtles, and small game like wild pigs of birds. They carry bows and arrows, as well as spears and knives, and unwelcome visitors have learned to respect their skill with all of the above. Many of those tools and weapons are tripped with iron, which the Sentinelese probably find washed ashore and work to suit their needs.