The Jarawas are an adivasi tribal community of the Andaman Islands whose existence is still reliant on hunting, fishing and gathering practises that have remained almost unchanged for thousands of years. The Jarawas are believed to be one of the oldest surviving isolated Stone Age tribals in the world, who live a nomadic life and having encountered the outside world only in 1974.
Today, their number is predicted to be at around 300, with clans of about 40-50 Jarawas living and moving together as a unit in and around the dense tropical rain forests of these islands. Today, the territories that the Jarawas inhabit in these rain-forests are rapidly getting reduced, as settlers from mainland India started inhabiting these islands, encroaching into the forests and reducing the Jarawas into a territorial reserve of about 700 sq km.
The encroachment of Jarawa’s land by outside settlers has put the Jarawas at a high risk state, as these islanders have no immunity to diseases and germs which most of the outside settlers bring with them. The encroachment into their territory would also affect the hunting and gathering patterns of these tribals as many animal species are reducing in number as a result of illegal poaching activities. This disturbance in the Jarawas existence in nature would also greatly affect their survival chances, leaving them vulnerable to human expansive growth.
The Jarawas exposure to the rest of humanity over the pass decade have made them dependent on outside humans as a source for food. In many cases, the Jarawas are being exploited by plantation owners as cheap labour and as such are making them lose out on their traditional way of life, getting them sucked into a capitalist mode of production, which would surely eat away their culture, practises and their traditional knowledge that have been passed on for thousands of years.
The biggest concern regarding the Jarawas and other isolated communities such as this, is that the degradation and destruction of forests would not only risk the survival of the Jarawas but also put the entire forest at risk. This is because communities such as the Jarawas have lived in these forests for thousands of years and play a major role in the preservation and maintenance of the eco-system in these forests and have cultivated a culture and practise that is conducive for the longevity of these forests.
The government of India has policies regarding the Jarawas, which on paper is probably one of the best in the world with regard to the preservation and safeguarding of such isolated communities. But fraudulent and corrupt practices of state officials leave the Jarawas at the mercy of human expansive mentality. And which may very well lead to the demise of one of the world’s oldest surviving communities in human history if not checked soon.
