North Sentinel Island | First Indian T. N. Pandit Contact Sentinelese

North Sentinel Island #India is one of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island. It is home to the Sentinelese, a people who have rejected, often violently, any contact with the outside world.

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 in order to prevent the resident tribespeople from contracting diseases to which they have no immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian navy.

Nominally, the island belongs to the South Andamanadministrative 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 non-Sentinelese people.

 The island is in effect a sovereign area under Indian protection. In 2018, Government of India excluded 29 islands – 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 Sentinelese have repeatedly attacked approaching vessels. This resulted in the deaths of two fishermen in 2006 and an #American missionary #John Allen Chau in 2018.


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