More than a week after the rescue of five baby orangutans from Odisha’s Balasore district, the whodunit continues to baffle the nation. The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, a central agency, and the state’s special task force are on the job. But very little has surfaced in terms of clues to trace the apes’ route from their home in the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia to an alien land far away.
It appears to be a smuggling operation gone wrong, with traffickers dumping the babies near the eastern coast. Orangutan smuggling is not new in India. A spate of seizures in Mizoram, Assam and Maharashtra in recent years shows that the illegal trade uses the Myanmar-Thailand-Bangladesh route to feed demand in the country. It’s possible that with the enforcement agencies focused on known smuggling corridors in the Northeast, the traffickers were trying a new route through Odisha.
The investigation requires the support of international agencies working against wildlife trafficking. Rehabilitating the baby apes is also desirable, but their lineage must be established and the primates repatriated as per UNEP’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Orangutans are facing the scourge of expanding palm plantations and climate change eroding their natural habitats. Yet home is where they belong, not in our zoos.
Their smuggling, meanwhile, must raise an alarm for Indian authorities. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence’s 2024-25 report noted that lucrative profits of exotic pet trade is a key driver of wildlife smuggling in the country. The worldwide trade is billed at a massive $20 billion, whereas seizure data for 2015-21 places South Asia at 9 percent of the global total.
India also acts as a source for trade in pangolin scales, elephant tusks, tiger and leopard skins as well as turtles, while serving as a transit space for other exotic species. Much of the trade is contracted online. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2024 report cited a case where a trafficker in Indonesia had placed bids for tigers and star tortoises to be delivered in Thailand, with the network spanning India, Pakistan and Malaysia operating through social media platforms. It’s evident that India cannot fight this illicit global trade on its own. The orangutans are reminding us that this requires stronger collaboration with regional countries to intensify surveillance, intelligence and crackdown on the menace.