The New Indian Express ·
Environment
Mystery of the cute baby apes
Five baby orangutans rescued from a forest in Balasore district have put the spotlight back on the possible changing trends of the global smuggling network. The Odisha government handed over the probe to a Special Task Force (STF), which will work in close coordination with the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, an autonomous agency under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.
While the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the young red apes have prompted investigators to look beyond the rescue itself, smuggling from Myanmar or Bangladesh through West Bengal appears a possibility.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Wildlife Crime Report 2024, the global illegal wildlife trade involves at least 4,000 species with the market size estimated at a mind-boggling USD 20 billion per annum. The report places India not only as a source country for elephant tusks, tiger and leopard skins, red sanders and pangolin scales, but also as a transit hub for exotic animals and birds from Southeast Asia.
As for the orangutans, two babies were rescued during their trafficking to Andhra Pradesh’s Eluru in 2015, which led investigators to believe that the smuggling route ran via Kolkata to Odisha and beyond. Another such case was discovered in Mumbai in 2020.
However, three subsequent cases in 2022-23 showed that the transit route was via Mizoram, which shares a substantial border with Myanmar. Indian agencies that busted the operation found Sumatran orangutans being smuggled from Indonesia, where these red apes are a protected species.
The trade route from Indonesia appears to go to Malaysia and then to Thailand before entering Myanmar and Bangladesh. This is where it moves into Mizoram from.
Former Odisha DGP B K Sharma, who had dealt with major wildlife crimes at the national level, says wildlife coming in from the Myanmar side crosses into the Northeast before being transported by train or road towards South India, primarily Chennai and, to some extent, Mumbai, where there is a market for exotic species. This, Sharma says, makes Odisha a possible trade route for illegal wildlife trafficking.
Odisha’s history of wildlife trafficking makes it a possible transit route. In the Smuggling in India Report 2024-25, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence noted that the Eastern Ghats (for red sanders), Assam and Odisha (for ivory and pangolin) and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (for turtles) act as source regions for international trafficking through seaports, land borders and airports to China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the UAE and Singapore. These countries are a source for exotic species heading to Chennai, Mumbai and Bengaluru, mostly via airports.
However, Monesh Singh Tomar, officer-in-charge of the Wildlife Crime Control Division at Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), looks at the latest orangutan discovery and rescue from two angles. While Odisha is known for the trade in pangolin scales and leopard hides, smuggling of orangutans is a different ball game altogether, he feels. “It requires a lot of expertise. Established smuggling networks which have handled such tasks in the past must be involved in it,” he says.
Tomar says two possibilities must be examined closely in the current case. First, whether Odisha is increasingly being used as a transit route for the illegal trade in exotic species. And second, if the abandoning of the orangutan babies in the Balasore forest was staged.
“Exotic species were earlier moved from Myanmar to other parts of India through the Northeast, particularly Assam and Mizoram. But with stronger enforcement and intensified crackdowns, traffickers may now be looking for alternative routes,” he says.
A route through Bangladesh and West Bengal into Odisha could be one such alternative, which he feels must be investigated. In fact, the DRI report also shows Kolkata has emerged as a major hub, acting as a link between domestic markets and international smuggling routes.
There are indications that cross-border trafficking networks are already operating in the region. The rescue of eight endangered golden langurs by Assam Police in June last, indicating a highly organised cross-border wildlife trafficking syndicate. With better enforcement across the Northeast, particularly in Assam, experts believe traffickers could increasingly be looking for less-scrutinised routes.
Besides, given the high value of orangutans, Tomar suggests probing whether the ape trafficking was itself staged. “Why would anyone leave five baby orangutans in a Odisha forest, only to be rescued by forest officials? There could be a bigger picture. It may have also been a staged act for zoo-to-zoo transfer to help them reach their intended destination. This too needs to be explored,” he suggested.
