A high-powered Central Government group is coming around to the view that the only way of saving primitive groups like the Jarawas on the Andamans is “measured engagement on their terms”.

“Iterative measured engagement, and on their terms, is the only way forward,” said Jairam Ramesh, Union Minister of State for Commerce, who co-chairs the high-power policy group on friendly contact with primitive tribes. “But how to take this forward is a tough call, bordering on a dharam sankat.”

Ramesh visited the Jarawa reserve here, deep in the forest, and spent time with the 200-odd tribespeople. He came here at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, UPA chairperson and president of the Congress.

The reserve is about an hour's drive from Port Blair, but it could well be ages away. The Jarawas wear little clothing and live off the forest chiefly by hunting boar with bow and arrow and gathering honey. They speak a language only a handful of outsiders can understand.

The Jarawas, simultaneously considered both a threatened community and a global genetic goldmine, pose a challenge like never before for the Indian government, with most experts suggesting that their extinction is a foregone conclusion. With another even more primitive group, the Sentinelese, they are believed to be the oldest known society of the human race that has existed continuously for the last 50-60 thousand years after they migrated out of Africa.

“It has to be a gradual process,” says Shamsher K Sheriff, chief secretary of the islands. He says isolating the Jarawas is the easiest thing, but that only breeds hostility. He says he doesn't want the Jarawas to end up like the Onges and the Great Andamanese, two tribes that assimilated themselves into modern society and lost all identity.

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