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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | All by himself, baby lifts population by 1% by Tapas Chakraborty

All by himself, baby lifts population by 1% by Tapas Chakraborty

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published Published on Oct 15, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 15, 2011

A couple from an Andaman tribe with just 100 members left have had a baby, sending their island hamlet into raptures and delighting anthropologists worried about the group’s extinction.

The Onge baby boy born earlier this week to Shri Santosh, 28, and Reetai, 26, is doing fine, officials in the Andamans’ welfare department said today.

“Both the mother and child are in good health. With the birth, the Onge population is now 101,” the department said.

That number has come as a big relief for Som Naidu, the director of tribal welfare. “The number had fallen to 94 in December 2009 when six Onge men died after consuming toxic chemicals mistaking them for hooch,” Naidu said from Port Blair.

The Onges, concentrated in Little Andaman, 125km from Port Blair, are the island’s smallest indigenous group after the Great Andamanese, who are now only 50-strong and live on Strait Island. The Jarawas are another endangered tribe, with just 264 of them left, mostly in Middle Andaman.

Naidu explained why the birth meant so much to him. “Since the hooch deaths, we were encouraging the widows of the men who died to remarry to stop further decline in their population. That encouragement has yielded some results. In the past two years, six children were born (after some of the widows remarried). Now, another birth is an added boost.”

S.S. Barik, a senior researcher with the Anthropological Survey of India in Port Blair, underscored the next challenge. “This (the birth) is a news to celebrate as the pall of gloom over the Onges’ future has at least temporarily been lifted. Now we need to improve their living conditions.”

If the birth was extraordinary, the procedure was unusual too — for the Onges, that is. The baby was born at a primary health centre in Little Andaman, near Santosh and Reetai’s home in Dugong Creek.

That was a far cry from the way the tribe keep their pregnant women in their shanties, attended to by “midwives” from the community. “Onge women are now being trained in safe-delivery procedures,” said one officer.

The Telegraph, 15 October, 2011, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111015/jsp/nation/story_14626419.jsp


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