In one of India’s remotest corners, a quiet but historic shift unfolded. On Great Nicobar Island, seven members of the reclusive Shompen tribe- a community that has long lived deep inside dense tropical forests- walked into a polling booth and pressed an EVM button for the very first time. There were no crowds, slogans or campaign noise. Just a tribe taking its first step into the democratic fold, watched by officials, villagers and elders who understood the magnitude of the moment.
Behind this milestone stands IAS officer Jyoti Kumari, a 2018-batch AGMUT cadre officer who served as Deputy Commissioner of Nicobar. For her, this wasn’t just a successful outreach effort — it was a promise that governance would no longer skip the people who had remained invisible for decades.
The Shompens, counted at just 229 in the 2011 Census, had lived largely disconnected from healthcare, administration and civic participation. Bringing them into the democratic process required patience, cultural sensitivity and a deep respect for their pace of change.
Kumari’s first lesson came from the past. Old archival files- handwritten records from Japanese-occupation years and early post-Independence administrators- revealed how delicate relations with the tribe had always been. They became her guiding light: move slowly, listen deeply, and protect identity above everything.
She then brought multiple agencies to the table — tribal welfare teams, health workers, SVEEP educators, youth volunteers, civil supplies staff and police — all anchored by a young Nicobari interpreter, Mathiyas, who became the bridge to the Shompen dialect. Outreach was redesigned around the tribe’s worldview. Without calendars or dates, the Shompens tracked election day with a simple knotted rope, untying one knot each morning until voting day arrived.
When polling day came, the community walked to a special booth named Shompen Hut and cast their vote, posing shyly beside an “I Vote for Sure” banner.
The effort didn’t end there. Kumari’s administration digitised fragile tribal archives, set up e-Corner Centres across remote islands for basic services, created local-language voter tools, and built a community-led movement that encouraged participation across Nicobar’s tribes — from the Onges to the Great Andamanese.
Today, even after her transfer, the systems she built continue to shape the islands. And the Shompen tribe’s first votes stand as a reminder that governance reaches its highest purpose when it reaches its farthest citizen– sometimes through quiet footsteps emerging from a forest, walking toward a polling booth called Shompen Hut.
