Port Blair (pronunciationⓘ), officially named Sri Vijaya Puram,[4] is the capital city of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India in the Bay of Bengal.

It is also the local administrative sub-division (tehsil) of the islands, the headquarters for the district of South Andaman, and the territory's only notified town.

It is a two to three-hour flight from mainland India to Port Blair's Veer Savarkar International Airport and three to four days by sea to reach Kolkata, Chennai, or Visakhapatnam from Haddo Wharf in the city.

[6] The city was named after Captain Archibald Blair, a British colonial navy official of the East India Company.

Radiocarbon dating studies of the kitchen refuse dumps from the mounds excavated by the Anthropological Survey of India at Choladari near Port Blair indicate human occupation for at least 2,000 years,[8][9][better source needed] although they are likely to have diverged from the inhabitants of the mainland significantly earlier.

In the 1830s and 1840s, shipwrecked crews who landed on the Andamans were often attacked and killed by the natives, alarming the British government.

Construction began in November 1857 at the renovated Port Blair, avoiding the vicinity of a saltwater swamp that seemed to have been the source of many of the old colony's problems.

The Cellular Jail is also known as Kala Pani (translated as "Black Waters"), a name given to it due to the torture and general ill-treatment of its Indian convicts.

[12] Although affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Port Blair survived sufficiently to act as a base for relief efforts in the islands.

The council came into existence on 2 October 1957 after the assent by the President of India to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands (Municipal Board's) Regulation, 1957 Act on 11 March 1957.