Power, internet and money in the Andamans

Every island here generates its own electricity from diesel, got fibre only in 2020, and has gone from cash-only to UPI-everywhere inside a decade. All three shape a trip more than most visitors expect.

Power

Every island runs its own diesel power plants. There is no grid connection to the mainland and no inter-island transmission worth the name — each island generates what it uses. South Andaman additionally has solar generation at scale; the other islands do not.

Rolling blackouts are normal

Demand runs ahead of what that generation can comfortably supply, so rolling blackouts are common across the whole territory. This is not a fault waiting to be repaired; it is how the supply gets managed. Expect the power to go, expect it back, and read nothing into it.

Why the electricity is expensive

Generating from diesel, on an island, at the end of a long fuel supply chain, is costly — and the government subsidises the tariff, both the domestic rate and the commercial one. Even subsidised, it remains expensive.

Domestic tariffs are somewhat lower than commercial ones, and as a visitor you never touch the domestic rate. You are staying in commercial premises, so the power behind your air conditioning is billed commercially, and that cost sits inside your room rate whether or not anyone itemises it for you.

Havelock and Neil have it worse

The tourist islands are hit hardest. Havelock and Neil carry a visitor load well beyond what their generation was ever built for, and the supply situation there is genuinely bad — noticeably worse than the main island.

Hotels cope the only way available to them: inverters for the short cuts, generators for the long ones. That equipment, and the diesel to run it, is a standing cost of operating on those islands — and it is one of the quieter reasons a room on Havelock costs what it does.

Port Blair comes off better, on economies of scale and on being the primary port city where the fuel actually lands. Not cheap. Just less bad.

Getting online

Until 2020, the islands ran on satellite links — slow, expensive, and with the latency you would expect.

That changed with the CANI undersea cable, commissioned in August 2020: roughly 2,300 km of fibre from Chennai to Port Blair, with onward segments to Swaraj Dweep (Havelock), Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Great Nicobar, Long Island and Rangat. Port Blair got around 400 Gbps of capacity and the other landing points around 200 Gbps each.

Shaheed Dweep (Neil) was not one of the landing points — worth knowing if you plan to work from there. Today 4G and 5G reach many areas, and connectivity is unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago, but it thins out fast once you leave the main settlements.

Which SIM to carry

Three networks matter here: Jio, Airtel and BSNL.

Airtel and Jio have very good coverage in most places, and they are what you want if you care about data speed. For a normal trip, either is the right answer.
BSNL reaches furthest. It gets to places the private networks do not, which is why locals heading somewhere remote still keep one. The trade is real, though: speeds and call quality are noticeably poorer. It is the fallback, not the first choice.
Neil (Shaheed Dweep) is the weak spot. There is signal — this is not a dead island — but it is not the easy, everywhere signal of Port Blair and South Andaman, and you will notice the difference. That it was left off the undersea cable’s landing points is the underlying reason.

One SIM for a week in the usual places: Jio or Airtel. Going properly remote: BSNL is the one that will still show a bar.

Cash, cards and UPI

UPI is accepted almost everywhere, and that is the most useful thing to know about money here. Shops, restaurants, activity operators, autos — the QR code is ubiquitous, and you can run most of a trip without touching cash at all.

ATMs are not hard to find either. Port Blair is a town of over 150,000 people, so cash machines are about as available as in any small Indian city. On Havelock there are ATMs near the main town. It thins out from there, in step with everything else.

Where cash still earns its place is off-grid — a beach shack, a remote stretch with no signal, a stall where the network has dropped. Carry some for exactly that, not as your default.

One piece of local texture worth knowing: when the signal is down, people will often just wait for it. A vendor who cannot take your payment right now will frequently stand there with you until a bar of signal appears, rather than lose the sale or push you towards cash. It is a small thing, and it tells you a good deal about how the place operates.

Island life — who lives here, how the territory is governed, and why haggling works the way it does.
When to visit — the season month by month, what the rain really does, and the tides that change every beach.
Getting around — autos, scooters, and the private-versus-government ferry decision.
Eating and drinking — late-night food delivery, the 2-litre bottle rule, and the 5 litres of spirits you may fly in.