Hundreds of Jarawa tribespeople have started leaving their traditional habitats in India's Eastern islands of Andamans.

The cause is not yet clear, but some experts say there could be a food shortage in the island's jungles.

Anthropologists fear the tribe are slowly becoming extinct like some other tribes in the islands.

Contact teams of the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) have tried to establish contacts with the Jarawas, who still hunt and gather food and cannot cultivate.

Until not so long ago the Jarawas would shoot their arrows at anyone approaching them, but in recent months some of them have responded favourably to pots of cooked food left behind by the ASI's contact parties.

During the past four days nearly half the tribes known population - almost 200 people in all - have moved towards Kadamtala township nearly 25 km south of the island's administrative capital, Port Blair.

They are crowding around a local police station, apparently in want of food.

Some experts suspect a food crisis may be looming large in the Jarawa-dominated jungles of central Andamans.

Taste for cooked food

But Sabyasachi Vasu Roy Choudhur,. known for his research on the islands, believes interference from the ISI may be responsible for the Jarawas' change.

"I don't think that there is a real food crisis for the Jarawas in the Andamans because if that was the case then the Jarawas would not have refused the coconuts and other kinds of traditional food.

In fact, I would say that under the influence of the Anthropological Survey of India, tribal people have become familiar with modern food habits, and now they are more attracted to cooked food, and therefore they prefer it to their traditional food."

Mr Roy Choudhuri says he is aware of the dangerous side effects of a sudden change of food habits by a primitive tribal group such as the Jarawas.

He says other indigenous tribespeople in the Andamans lost their ability to procreate after switching over to the modern way of life.