The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Had a Net Domestic Product of Rs 2.76 Lakh Per Person in 2023-24, Above the National Average, Across 836 Islands of Which 31 Are Inhabited

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands had a net domestic product of Rs 2,76,000 per person in 2023-24 (provisional, at current prices), against Rs 1,88,892 for India as a whole, according to a table in the islands’ own Directorate of Economics and Statistics yearbook. The territory spreads across 836 islands, islets and rocky outcrops in the Bay of Bengal, of which 31 were inhabited at the 2011 census, and its capital has been called Sri Vijaya Puram since September 2024.

How the islands became a Union territory

The First Schedule of the Constitution defines the territory as the area that, before the Constitution took effect, formed the Chief Commissioner’s Province of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Seventh Amendment, in force from 1 November 1956, rewrote Article 240 so that the islands appear in it as a Union territory, meaning a part of India run by the Centre and not by an elected state government. The comparison of all eight Union territories shows where the islands sit.

The courts were settled earlier. The Calcutta High Court (Extension of Jurisdiction) Act, 1953, made that court the High Court for the islands and treated orders passed by the Chief Commissioner, while he acted as the islands’ High Court, as orders of the Calcutta court.

The capital’s name changed on 13 September 2024, when the Ministry of Home Affairs approved a proposal to replace Port Blair with Sri Vijaya Puram. The islands’ Secretary for Art and Culture told Nicobar Times that a 16-member naming committee set up by the administration in 2013 had voted 15 in favour, with one member abstaining. The committee includes the Member of Parliament, the chairperson of the municipal council, the heads of both Zilla Parishads and the chairman of the Tribal Council. The same procedure, he said, had earlier renamed Havelock Island Swaraj Dweep, Neil Island Shaheed Dweep and Ross Island Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Dweep, and in 2022 named 21 uninhabited islands after Param Vir Chakra awardees.

How the territory is governed

Article 239(1) says each Union territory is administered by the President through an administrator, appointed with whatever title the President chooses. The administration’s portal names a Lieutenant Governor for the islands, and the 2026 regulation described below calls the office the Administrator. There is no legislature: Article 239A, which lets Parliament create one, names only Puducherry.

Law reaches the islands in two ways. Parliament passes Acts that apply to the territory, and under Article 240 the President may make regulations “for the peace, progress and good government” of the islands. A regulation can repeal or amend an Act of Parliament and, once promulgated, has the same force as one. The latest example is Regulation No. 11 of 2026, published in the Gazette of India on 27 August 2026 to consolidate the law on registering societies; it comes into force on a date the Administrator notifies. An older one, Regulation No. 3 of 1956, protects the tribes and is covered below.

In Parliament the islands send one member to the Lok Sabha, according to the First Schedule of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The Fourth Schedule gives Rajya Sabha seats to only three Union territories, Delhi (3), Jammu and Kashmir (4) and Puducherry (1), so the islands have none.

Below the Lieutenant Governor there are three districts (South Andaman, North and Middle Andaman, and Nicobar), nine tehsils and nine development blocks. The Directorate lists one municipal council, 70 gram panchayats (village councils) and two Zilla Parishads, and for the tribal areas seven Tribal Councils and 53 Tribal Village Councils. South Andaman held 238,142 of the 380,581 residents counted in 2011.

The Calcutta High Court remains the islands’ High Court and sits at Port Blair through a circuit bench; it was that bench that heard the Great Nicobar petition on 6 May 2026. Article 241 allows Parliament to give a Union territory a High Court of its own, and none has been created for the islands. Hindi and English are the official languages, and the administration’s portal gives the 2001 census mother tongues as Bengali 26 per cent, Hindi 18.23, Tamil 17.68, Telugu 12.81, Malayalam 8.11 and Nicobarese 8.05.

The people, as the 2011 census counted them

The islands had 380,581 residents in 2011: 202,871 men and 177,710 women, a sex ratio of 876 women per 1,000 men, at 46 people per square kilometre. Literacy was 86.63 per cent. The Scheduled Tribe population was 28,530, about 7.5 per cent of the total, with a tribal literacy rate of 75.58 per cent. These are 2011 figures; the next census is under way.

The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the islands hard. Human Rights Watch, citing the United Nations Country Team in India, gives 1,755 deaths in the territory, and says most of the 5,823 people India’s Home Minister told Parliament on 10 March 2005 were missing nationwide came from the islands.

The economy

Gross state domestic product, the value of goods and services produced in the territory, was Rs 12,499 crore in 2023-24 at current prices (provisional, 2011-12 base), up 4.36 per cent on the year before. At constant prices it was Rs 8,126 crore, up 4.39 per cent. The series fell 4.66 per cent in 2020-21 and then grew 11.62 per cent in 2021-22 and 15.25 per cent in 2022-23.

Services produced 68.12 per cent of the 2023-24 gross value added, industry 19.17 per cent and the primary sector (farming, fishing and forestry) 12.71 per cent. The Directorate counts 7,171 square kilometres of forest in a land area of 8,249 square kilometres.

The Directorate records 357,453 arrivals in 2023-24, of whom 10,550 were foreign. That compares with 520,749 in 2019-20 and 81,294 in 2020-21. Of 2023-24’s visitors, 329,975 went to the Cellular Jail, the colonial-era prison told in Kala Pani and the Cellular Jail. The islands’ reefs are among those surveyed in the article on India’s coral reefs.

Tribal reserves and the rules for entering them

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 (Regulation No. 3 of 1956) lets the administration close areas to outsiders. Its rules, notified on 21 April 1957, set out passes for entering a reserved area (under section 7 of the Regulation) and licences for trading in one (section 6(1)). A pass runs for up to a year, and the rules waive the fee for a government servant on duty. The schedules that cover tribal areas in the states are explained in the Fifth and Sixth Schedules article.

The administration’s portal names five groups it classes as particularly vulnerable: the Great Andamanese on Strait Island, the Onge on Little Andaman, the Jarawa on the west coasts of South and Middle Andaman, the Sentinelese on North Sentinel Island (about 60 square kilometres) and the Shompen on Great Nicobar. It says the Jarawa reserve was enlarged from 847 to 1,028 square kilometres with a 5 km buffer zone around it. It gives the Great Andamanese population as an estimated 10,000 in 1789, 625 in 1901, 19 in 1969 and 41 by 1999.

North Sentinel Island and the waters around it are a Tribal Reserve under the 1956 Regulation, with a five nautical mile exclusion zone, Nicobar Times reports. On the morning of 1 March 2026, police found a dinghy with two fishermen 100 to 200 metres off its shore, and the paper reported them booked under the Regulation.

The Andaman and Nicobar Command

The Andaman and Nicobar Command came into existence on 8 October 2001, following the Kargil Review Committee and Group of Ministers recommendations, and places elements of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard under one unified command, according to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. It began as an experimental command to test whether other theatre commands could follow. Its duties include defending the islands’ territory, waters and airspace, watching sea lanes and the exclusive economic zone, and joint planning. The Institute’s analyst writes that further expansion is not feasible given land constraints and ecological issues.

The Great Nicobar project, with both sides on record

The Great Nicobar project, planned on the southernmost island of the territory, combines a container transshipment port, an airport, a gas and solar power plant and a township. Mongabay India puts its cost at Rs 81,000 crore.

The government’s case is set out in a Press Information Bureau FAQ of 1 May 2026. It calls the project one of strategic, defence and national importance. Of 166.1 square kilometres proposed for development, 130.75 square kilometres is forest, 1.82 per cent of the territory’s forest. The FAQ counts 18.65 lakh trees in that forest and says at most 7.11 lakh will be felled, in three phases between 2025 and 2047, with 65.99 square kilometres kept as green area. Compensatory afforestation (replacement planting) is placed outside the islands, on 24,750.93 hectares identified mainly in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. Of 751.070 square kilometres of tribal reserve on the island, 84.10 overlap the project; the FAQ says 73.07 are being de-notified and 76.98 re-notified, a net gain of 3.912 square kilometres, and that no displacement of tribal people will be permitted.

Tribal leaders dispute the consultation. Mongabay India reports that the Tribal Council’s chairman, Barnabas Manju, said the 2022 no-objection certificate was signed “in such a hurry” that members could not read it, and that the Council withdrew consent by letter and got no reply. Titus Peter, a village captain, said the Forest Rights Act had not been implemented. The report says the administration had not responded to questions about a 7 January 2026 meeting at which chiefs say they were asked to sign land surrender certificates. The administration has told Parliament that all procedures were followed, including under that Act.

The National Green Tribunal declined on 16 February 2026 to interfere with the 2022 environmental clearance, finding adequate safeguards and citing the project’s strategic importance, Mongabay India reports. The applicant, Ashish Kothari, had argued that about 7 square kilometres of the project fall in a coastal zone where development is prohibited and that the coral plan was incomplete. On 6 May 2026 a Calcutta High Court bench at Port Blair held a separate petition by Meena Gupta, a former civil servant, maintainable. It alleges the project breaches the Forest Rights Act, and the court said it would examine the claim.

What comes next

The Forest Rights Act petition remains before the High Court, with no final ruling reported in the sources checked. The government’s schedule for Great Nicobar runs tree felling in three phases: 2.79 lakh trees in 2025 to 2035, 3.41 lakh in 2036 to 2041 and 0.91 lakh in 2042 to 2047.