My extraordinary journey to visit the world’s last ‘Stone Age’ tribe

Lawley argues his grandfather cared deeply for the welfare of those he was responsible for – including the indigenous tribes. He was the first to document their decline, conducting two censuses of the islands in 1911 and 1921. “It was not realised until too late that to bring a people like the Andamanese under the influence of civilisation was altogether harmful,” his grandfather wrote.

As a foreign reporter, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are difficult to access. As far as I could tell, I was the first Western journalist to travel there for years. Few people I met were willing to speak openly. Yet there is one area so sensitive that even Indian nationals are banned. Great Nicobar Island lies in the far south of the island chain, an uncomfortable three-day boat ride from Port Blair. It is the proposed site of the Indian Government’s Great Nicobar Development Project.

Though it has proved controversial in the Indian media, foreign outlets have barely covered it. But, if this grandiose project goes ahead, the dire consequences for the ecology of the area and its indigenous tribes will dwarf any of the impacts so far experienced on the islands.

Over the next three decades, Modi’s government plans to create ‘a new Hong Kong’ at Campbell Bay, a harbour in the south-eastern corner of Great Nicobar. This Rs 72,000 crore (£7 billion) initiative will see the construction of an airport, military base and a deep-water transhipment terminal.

A brand-new city will be built to house 650,000 settlers – on an island that currently sustains around 8,000. Great Nicobar was designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 2013, and Campbell Bay is a nesting ground for the endangered giant leatherback turtle. Up to one million trees of Great Nicobar’s rainforest are expected to be uprooted. The Indian government has promised to “offset” this destruction through the construction of “the world’s largest jungle safari reserve” in Gurugram, on the dusty plains outside Delhi, 2,000km away. There is even talk of transporting Great Nicobar’s native fauna, including 20,000 coral colonies and salt-water crocodiles, to this as-yet-unbuilt reserve.

“It’s completely crazy,” says Callum Russell of Survival International, a British NGO that campaigns for the rights of indigenous peoples. “The whole thing is a fever dream of someone in an office in Delhi.”

The Nicobar Islands are a seismic hotspot. The epicentre of the massive earthquake that triggered the 2004 tsunami, killing an estimated 230,000 people across the region, and causing billions of pounds of damage, lies close to Campbell Bay. The proposed location of the deep-water terminal has experienced nearly 444 earthquakes in the last 10 years.

The project also poses “a real existential risk” to the two indigenous tribes of the island, the Nicobarese and the Shompen, says Sophie Grig of Survival International. The NGO has coordinated a letter, signed by 39 genocide scholars, which argues that the Great Nicobar development project will be a ‘death sentence’ for the tribes.