India’s Most Elusive Address
The Remote and Hostile North Sentinel Island Is a Census Taker’s Biggest Torment. In most parts of India, national-census takers use a pen and paper to make their tallies. In the island territories of Andaman and Nicobar, where surveyors are barred by law from interacting with indigenous tribes, they need boats, video cameras, coconuts and good throwing arms. Counting India’s population of roughly 1.2 billion across 1.2 million square miles—a task that must be completed by Sunday—is one of the world’s most challenging census exercises. Much of India is rural rather than urban. Its landscape includes the Himalayan Mountains and an island with one lighthouse keeper.
India also has indigenous tribes living in forests and on islands that are off-limits, even to other Indians, so as to protect their dwindling members from exposure to germs or exploitation for tourism. Then there are security issues: The widespread Maoist insurgency prevents census takers from reaching some violence-soaked areas. And census workers must persuade nomadic shepherds to stay put temporarily.
But perhaps the toughest task is counting the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel, which is part of the Andaman & Nicobar archipelago, a chain of more than 500 islands in the Bay of Bengal between India and Thailand with about 356,000 people. Some of these islands once served as a British penal colony—which left the Andamans with the epithet “black water”—and were also briefly occupied by the Japanese during World War II. This indigenous community is often described as “the most isolated tribe” in the world. Indian law intends to keep them that way.