Experts say it would be hard to assess numbers of Sentinelese without causing them alarm and figures would be inaccurate anyway
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.
