<i>India questions tribal 'isolation' policy </i>

A Zarwa youth poses infront of camera

Many of India's protected tribal groups live in "beastly" conditions and the government should review long-standing laws that keep them in isolation, the country's tribal affairs minister told AFP.
His comments were prompted by the “Human Zoo” scandal involving a video of naked Jarawa tribal women on the tropical Andaman Islands being told to dance for tourists, who had allegedly bribed a policeman to gain access to their reserve.
Contact with several tribes on the islands, set deep in the Indian Ocean, is illegal in a bid to protect their indigenous way of life and shield them from diseases against which they have no protection.
The policy means that while economic development is surging ahead in India's main cities, there remain pockets of the country where conditions have hardly evolved in centuries and modernity is deliberately kept out.
"As far as my personal view is concerned it will be unfair to leave them like that in a beastly condition forever," Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo told AFP in an interview.
"At the same time I would add that I am certainly not one who would like to expose them to shopping mall and junk culture."
Not all of India's vast number of indigenous groups are protected or live in reserves, but they consistently rank bottom in terms of human development alongside "untouchables" at the bottom of India's caste system.
Deo, who has vowed to visit the Andaman Islands on a special trip within weeks, said that the issue of how to deal with protected tribal groups was highly divisive and that the government needed to listen to tribal people.
"We have to start a dialogue," he said.
But other groups and campaigners, such as Survival International, say tribes such as the 402-strong Jarawa tribe should be left alone.
The London-based Observer newspaper, which first published the video that triggered the controversy, said its journalist saw tourists toss bananas and biscuits to tribespeople on the roadside.
Other tribes on the Andamans, such as the Sentinelese, shun all contact with the outside world and are known to be hostile to any encroachers.
Their last remaining territory, North Sentinel island, is out of bounds even to the Indian navy in a bid to protect its reclusive inhabitants who number only about 150.
Samir Acharya, a founder of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology environmental group, who opposes any weakening of the non-contact law.
"Their quality of life is quite good," Acharya told AFP from Port Blair, adding that efforts to bring tribal people on the island into the mainstream had been bad for them.