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One afternoon in the Andamans, as we all sat around a table, enjoying a quiet moment, my friend told a story he’d heard from an acquaintance. The said acquaintance had gone to meet some government high-up in Port Blair and had walked into the man’s office just as he was finishing a discussion on the things that should be on the schedule of protected items that cannot be carried by passengers leaving the airport. Figuring prominently in that list, between the shells and the coral, was the dugong, a sea cow. We rolled around in laughter thinking about straight-faced airport officials quizzing us at the airport, “Ma’am, do you have a dugong tucked away in your suitcase?”

But here’s the thing, the only reason we could poke fun and enjoy a hearty laugh was because the government has been making serious efforts to conserve and protect the environs of the islands and the sea around them. There is a list at the airport of the types of shells and corals that are not allowed to be carried out of the islands, and even the remotest of islands have regular IRP patrols to counter the Burmese poachers, who come looking for sea cucumber and anything else that they can sell for a price.

Dugong (Courtesy: Greenpeace)

Of course there are problems with that too. As a 65-year-old Hungarian man I met on the ferry from Rangat to Havelock explained to me. He was a veteran of the islands, an ex-carpenter on his third visit to the island and just returning from a 15-day sojourn on Long Island. He told me that Long Island was still not very popular with tourists and there were maybe five of them, all goras on the Island at that time. He also told me how I could tell the difference between the original forests on the islands, which were think and green right to the water’s edge, and the replanted ones, which were already brown and dry, covering the ground with leaves though summer had only just begun.

He pointed out the increasing difficulties he’d been facing in getting permits to visit the Andamans. The first time, he easily got a 30-day permit and an extension. On his current visit, he’d only got a 15-day permit and extensions were proving difficult. Part of the reason, he said, was that the hippie tourists to Havelock had brought drugs to the islands with them and the authorities wanted to crack down on that. Another reason was that many of the tourists at Havelock had been found outstaying their permits.

“It’s good to have these rules,” he said. “But what I don’t like is that while there are so many rules regarding where I can go in the Andamans and how long I can stay, the locals can get away with anything. They’re the ones who treat the ocean like a big dustbin and dump their trash in it. And whenever I visit their houses I see beautiful coral brought from the bottom of the sea and decorated on their tables and windows. Now, that’s not fair.”

I know that’s at least partially true, because on my first trek near Wandoor, we came across the shell of a green turtle that locals had hunted and killed for its meat, some 20 days before.

I wish I’d been able to speak to someone within the government because it would be interesting to get an idea of the constraints they have to work with. An airport and permits are so much easier to watch, than about 200 islands, only about a 50 of which (if that many) are inhabited.

Still, there are many things being done. One that I appreciated very, very much was the fixing of permanent buoy lines at the diving sites around Havelock. In the not so distant past, every boat would drop its own anchor, damaging a bit of the coral at the bottom every time. At sites like South Button, where I swam at the ocean bed and saw the beautiful coral that covered it completely, that would be a criminal thing to do. But luckily, at these places, government divers have gone down and tied lines around large pieces of rock, and now any boat that comes there ties its own line to that, instead of dropping an anchor.

But the conservation of the islands is tied up with their development and the lives of the people who live there. And that poses a conundrum that is not easy to resolve. More on that debate another time.

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Posted by Neha Dara on Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 6:04 pm 
Filed under Travel · Tagged airport, Andaman and Nicobar, ocean, sea, South Andamans, South Button

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