ANDAMAN TRUNK ROAD (India): “Jarawa turn hostile” screamed the headline from the local paper.

Indignantly, it reported how primitive tribesmen came out of the jungle armed with bows, arrows and spears, raided a village in India’s Middle Andaman island and looted tools, food, clothes, cash and jewellery. It was the first such attack in seven years.

An indication that the Jarawa hunter-gatherers remain untamed primitives — or a cry for help from man’s earliest ancestors, their forests and their lifestyle, their existence under threat as never before?

“It is usual that poachers enter into Jarawa reserve areas to hunt wild animals,” a tribal welfare officer blithely notes in an internal report on April’s attack, obtained by Reuters.

Some of the poachers, he said, had stolen honey buried by the Jarawa and destroyed the carved containers used to store it.

Honey is the only food the Jarawa store, one of the most precious things they have. Enraged, they had retaliated.

“It is really frightening,” said author and activist Madhusree Mukherjee. “The surest way to kill hunter-gatherers is to take away their territory.”

The Jarawa are one of four ancient Negroid tribes barely surviving on the Andamans. Last month, Indian scientists said DNA evidence suggested they were direct descendents of man’s earliest ancestors, who migrated from Africa 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, only to be stranded on the islands by rising seawater.

Until just a few years ago, the Jarawa lived in isolation, preserving a simple lifestyle in their own Garden of Eden. Then the government built a road through their forest.

The 343-km Andaman Trunk Road (ATR), completed in 1989, was designed as an economic lifeline to link the island chain. Anthropologists say it has had a more sinister impact.

“The road may look like a little strip of land cutting through the forest, but it is a conduit opening the Jarawa up not just to germs but to all kinds of outside influence,” said Mukherjee. “Outsiders induce addictions. They supply them with tobacco or alcohol, so the Jarawa keep coming back, and have to bring their forest resources out to feed their addictions.”

In 2002 the Supreme Court ordered the Andaman and Nicobar government to close the 129-km stretch of the ATR passing through the Jarawa reserve. But the road remains open.

Reuters took the road to the edge of the Jarawa reserve last month. As we waited, a truck came out of the reserve piled high with bamboo, in contravention of a court ban on logging.

In the old days, the Jarawa used to chase outsiders away with their bows and arrows. In just a few years since the road was opened, many have learned basic Hindi, as well as modern vices.

“They used to come for food, coconuts and bananas,” said M. Rajendran, who runs a roadside tea shop on the edge of the reserve. “Now, they come for tobacco and paan (an addictive mixture of betel leaves and areca nut).”

When the road opened, Jarawa boys would hitch rides on the roofs of passing buses. Gradually, relations turned exploitive. Jarawa women have even sold sex to Indian truckers.

Disease such as pneumonia, bronchitis and measles have taken their toll. Today, just 250 Jarawa survive.

It is hard not to see the writing on the wall if nothing changes: disease, death and, for a few survivors, integration as an underclass. That has been the fate of the Great Andamanese, once a 10,000-strong race of warriors — until the British arrived with guns and disease in the 19th century.

Today, there are just 50 — most alcoholics, few pure-blooded.

It is rapidly becoming the fate of the 100 Onge, living in two depressed and dissolute groups in government shelters on Little Andaman island.

The Jarawa and the Sentinelese, who have so far repelled outsiders on their own island, are the key to man’s ancestry, said Samir Acharya of the Society of Andaman and Nicobar Ecology. “They are closest to the original people, the children of Mother Eve in East Africa,” he said.

There are even more fundamental reasons to save the Jarawa.

With their bows and arrows and hostility to outsiders, they have protected the last great swathe of Andamans rainforest, the last line of defence against a growing shortage of fresh water.

The second, simpler reason, can only be fully appreciated by watching videos of Jarawa making contact with outsiders. The proud, fun, happy, carefree men, women and children stand in stark contrast to the listless and depressed Onge.

“When I first met them, the Jarawa had such power, coming out of the forest and meeting outsiders as equals,” said Mukherjee.

“But when they enter our society, they don’t enter it as you or me. They enter as the least empowered members of society.”

Acharya and Mukherjee admit it is not possible to simply turn back the clock, to put the genie completely back in the bottle.

The Jarawa routinely come out of the forest for medical treatment these days, and know what the outside world can give.

But experts say the Jarawa are starting to realise they are better off in the forest, and starting to limit outside contact.

“But right now contact is overwhelming them,” said Mukherjee. “The point is that the outside world needs to give them space.”—Reuters

KARACHI: The tragic deaths of four university students — all in their mid-20s — in Karachi in a horrific traffic accident on Monday could have been prevented had the authorities, specifically the traffic police, stuck to a ban placed on the daytime movement of dumpers in the city.

Anyone who has driven regularly on Karachi’s main roads would not have missed the very rashly driven dumpers. They are especially common in places such as Korangi Road, Mauripur Road, Gizri (where many of them are parked at night on the road that leads to Zamzama, with the Naval Housing Scheme on one side), Shershah, most main roads in Defence and those that straddle the Lyari and Malir riverbeds. They are mostly used to ferry gravel and sand from the seafront and the Malir and Lyari riverbeds for commercial use, a practice which itself is most likely illegal and needs to be investigated by the city government.

In almost all cases, these dumpers are driven as if the person at the wheel is a lunatic, with utter contempt for any traffic law and complete disregard of the fact that a speeding dumper with a full load — given its compact design and large size — packs as much punch as a bulldozer and can be extremely intimidating for motorists, motorcyclists and other road users.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened on Monday on Tipu Sultan Road when a dumper loaded with gravel fell on a car with four passengers. By the time the police arranged a crane to lift the dumper off the car, two of the occupants had died while the other two were barely alive. They were taken to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (quite some distance away, given that several hospitals and clinics are situated in the Hill Park vicinity close to Tipu Sultan Road) but were pronounced dead on arrival.

A few months ago, these monstrous dumpers (what else can one call them given their penchant for crushing humans and cars with disturbing regularity) were in the news as well, having caused several accidents, including some that led to fatalities. In March, two policemen were killed and seven people were injured after a rashly driven dumper first collided with a stationary minibus and then hit a police kiosk on Mauripur Road. In October 2004, violence erupted in the Nagan Chowrangi area after one person died and three others were injured when a dumper collided with a yellow cab and then ran over a motorcycle rider.

According to newspaper reports, following the accident, four trucks coming from behind ran over the footpath, hitting a traffic signal. Their drivers fled, firing shots in the air. This enraged the people around the scene of the accident and they set the four trucks, and two other vehicles, on fire.

The March incident in particular was followed by several more in the space of a few days, prompting a ban by the city and the traffic police on the daytime movement of dumpers in the city. However, and like all good things in this country, that ban lasted for less than a week. A delegation of the proprietors of these heavy vehicles met those who mattered, including the DIG of traffic, and promised that from then on their vehicles would be driven in a civil manner.

One can only wonder whether the authorities were so naïve as to assume that from that day onward things would change. Weren’t the dozens of deaths in accidents involving dumpers enough to sway the authorities that a long-lasting ban was precisely what was needed? One, it would probably cut down the number of such accidents and prevent precious lives from being lost needlessly; two, it would send a message to the owners of these vehicles that the government and traffic police mean business, and three, it would make the public, and especially motorists and road-users, think that there are some people in a position of authority who care for their safety.

The Monday tragedy should now be used to place some kind of a lasting ban or restriction on the daytime movement of dumpers in Karachi.