As 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.

The last time India conducted a census was in 2011. Since then, officials have enforced a 5km exclusion zone around North Sentinel Island. This “eyes-on, hands-off” policy is aimed at shielding the tribe from diseases to which they have no immunity and protecting their autonomy.

The most isolated tribe in the world

Earlier censuses weren’t invasive. Officials would travel by boat, circling the shores of North Sentinel Island, close enough to glimpse the inhabitants but far enough to avoid being struck by arrows. RF Lowe, who supervised the census in 1921, wrote that with the Sentinelese “being uniformly hostile, no attempt was made at direct enumeration”.

The 2001 census listed 39 individuals seen on the beach. The 2011 census put the number at 15. Both figures are seen as “guesstimates” based on offshore observations. London-based Survival International, which advocates for Indigenous peoples’ rights, says the population is estimated to be anywhere from 50 to 150.

Believed to have migrated from Africa more than 50,000 years ago, the Sentinelese hunt, fish and forage using bows, arrows, spears and stone tools. Some anthropologists believe them to be the most isolated tribe in the world.

When the British established a penal colony in the Andamans in 1858, the islands were home to an estimated 5,000 people from various tribes. Within decades, many had died, either killed or wiped out by measles, influenza, syphilis and other diseases brought in by settlers

No Indian official has set foot on the 59 sq km island since 2014, not even to retrieve the bodies of four intruders killed by the Sentinelese, including US missionary John Allen Chau, 26. He landed on the island illegally in 2018 and, according to the fishers who ferried him, was shot dead with arrows.

‘A virus could wipe them out’

Despite the tribe’s hostility to outsiders, North Sentinel Island still attracts adventurers. In March, a 24-year-old Arizona YouTuber, Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, was arrested after filming himself sailing to the island and bringing a can of Diet Coke and a coconut as offerings, and blowing a whistle to draw attention to himself.

“The government used to land coconut-laden boats on the beach until the late 1990s,” says M Sasikumar, joint director of the Anthropological Survey of India. “But that was stopped because of the risk of disease. A virus could wipe them out.”

With the 2027 census looming, officials have been considering using drones and satellite imagery to estimate the Sentinelese population, but experts warn this could do more harm than good.

“It’s hard to imagine that such populations could be accurately assessed using drones, as both the Sentinelese and Shompen live in dense rainforest,” says Jonathan Mazower of Survival International. Using drones “would just feel intrusive”, he adds.

Flying drones could also cause panic among the islanders, experts warn. After the 2004 tsunami, the Sentinelese famously fired arrows at helicopters sent to check on their welfare.

The Sentinelese are not the only people who defy easy enumeration. Others, such as the Shompen of Great Nicobar and the Jarawa of Middle and South Andaman, have varying levels of contact with outsiders. Some accept medical help or provisions; others live near settled areas and are increasingly exposed to tourism and development.

“The Shompen live very deep inside the forests on the west coast,” says Barnabas Manju, chair of the Little and Great Nicobar Tribal Council. The 2011 census counted 229 Shompen – 141 males and 88 females – but that figure too is seen as unreliable.

Access to the Shompen is logistically difficult. Roads were damaged by the tsunami, which means that reaching the Shompen requires days of trekking while many avoid outsiders.