Child exploitation in Arunachal Pradesh

Child exploitation in Arunachal Pradesh takes many forms: child labour, child trafficking, domestic servitude, sexual abuse, and forced prostitution. All of this happens in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Authorities have identified the state as a destination for trafficked children. Victims are drawn disproportionately from marginalised communities, including the Chakma, Adivasi, and migrant populations from neighbouring Assam. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 47 incidents under the POCSO Act in Arunachal Pradesh in 2022.

A practice known locally as the bhonti system has been widely documented as child trafficking. Minor girls from Assam are purchased and brought into Arunachal Pradesh households as domestic servants. Police raids in 2024 and 2026 broke up interstate trafficking networks in the state capital, Itanagar. Government officials were among those arrested. In 2024, a POCSO court sentenced a government school hostel warden to death for sexually assaulting 21 children.

Bhonti culture

The word bhonti comes from Assamese, where it is a term of affection for a younger sister. In Arunachal Pradesh, the meaning has shifted. It now refers to a female domestic worker, and almost always a minor. Most bhontis are girls brought from Assam's impoverished tea belt and from Bodo tribal areas that have been torn apart by conflict.

The Federal investigated the practice in 2023. Children as young as eleven are sold by their own families to intermediaries. Sometimes the price is as low as Rs 2,000, roughly US$24. The intermediaries then sell the children on to households in Arunachal Pradesh, where they cook, clean, work on farms, and care for other children. Racho Buda, chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee of Lower Subansiri district, called it "an undeclared custom" present in "almost every household in Arunachal Pradesh" and said it violated the Child Labour Act.

Police data from Itanagar shows 14 human trafficking cases were registered in Arunachal Pradesh between 2019 and September 2023. Those cases led to 22 rescues and 21 arrests. Jummar Basar, Superintendent of Police (Crime) and nodal officer of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit, said the numbers were just "the tip of an iceberg." Parents, traffickers, and employers are all involved, which makes victims unlikely to report anything.

Between the years 2020 and 2022, the Arunachal Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights had registered130 cases in total, five of which involved trafficking. Eleven involved child labour. One was bonded labour. Sixty-nine were filed under the POCSO Act. Four involved physical assault. Keni Bagra, Superintendent of Police of Lower Subansiri, said traffickers based in Assam drove the operation, contacting employers in Arunachal Pradesh to arrange sales of domestic workers. In some cases, girls who escaped one household were placed in another within weeks by the same trafficking networks.

The Federal documented a girl who had worked as a bhonti since age eleven. She did not know her own name. Her employers had never called her anything but bhonti. She was rescued and spent more than a year in a shelter home in Ziro before she could remember her home address. Since 2005, that shelter had housed 72 children. Another survivor, a fifteen-year-old Bodo girl working as domestic help in Itanagar, was raped by a male member of the household. She was sent back to Assam at seven months pregnant. Her family refused to take her back. She gave birth at a shelter home and gave the child up for adoption.

A Scroll.in investigation in 2017 reported similar findings. The Itanagar Child Welfare Committee was receiving roughly twenty complaints of child rights violations every month. Between January 2016 and July 2017, Childline recorded 104 confirmed cases of child labour and seven cases of sexual abuse across the state. Ninety-one of those child labour cases came from Itanagar alone. Kani Nada Maling, who headed the Itanagar Child Welfare Committee, said most rescued children had been sent into domestic labour by poor families and then subjected to physical, psychological, or sexual abuse by employers. The victims came predominantly from marginalised groups, including indigenous Adivasis, Assamese tea tribe communities, migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Chakma refugees, and Puroiks, a formerly bonded labour community in the state.

Trafficking of Chakma children

The Chakma, a Buddhist ethnic group who were initially displaced from the Chittagong Hill Tracts were resettled in Arunachal Pradesh in 1964 following the construction of the Kaptai Dam In 2015, the Supreme Court of India directed that Chakmas be granted citizenship rights but the state government continues to not comply. As a result, the community members still lack citizenship documents, residence certificates, and access to government jobs and services. Journalist notes that this might be one of the few reasons, why the community is facing an increase in child trafficking cases.

The Wire investigated in 2022 and found trafficking of Chakma children was widespread. The worst-affected areas were the Diyon Circle of Changlang district and the districts of Namsai and Papum Pare. In the villages of Aranyapur, Udaipur, Dharmapur, Mudoidweep, and Dumpani, almost every household had lost a child to traffickers. Families handed children to intermediaries after being promised education and employment. The children were then put to work in domestic servitude, construction, or sexual exploitation.

Individual cases documented by The Wire included a twelve-year-old boy found dead in unexplained circumstances shortly after being handed to an intermediary, and a second twelve-year-old who went missing and was still untraced a decade later. A thirteen-year-old girl was taken to Namsai with promises of work. Her captor sexually abused her. She was eventually rescued after someone filed a complaint on her behalf. Without citizenship rights, families could not access legal protections or report crimes to police effectively. The Arunachal Pradesh Chakma Students' Union ran its own anti-trafficking unit to track missing children.

The United States Department of Labor's 2022 report on the worst forms of child labour cited the trafficking of Chakma children in Arunachal Pradesh. It referenced The Wire investigation as evidence of the link between exclusionist state policies and trafficking vulnerability. Caritas India separately identified northeast India as a hub for child trafficking. This particular study, found that about 80 per cent of the children from Assam's tea tribe communities were recruited for Child labour in Arunachal Pradesh.

Sexual abuse in government institutions

In September 2024, a POCSO court at Yupia sentenced had found, Yumken Bagra, a former hostel warden at the Karo Government Residential School in Shi-Yomi district, for having sexually assaulted 21 children. He was subsequently sentenced to death His victims which 15 girls and 6 boys, were aged six to fifteen. This was the first ever death sentence ever imposed for a child sexual abuse incident in Arunachal Pradesh.

The court also sentenced former headmaster Singtung Yorpen and Hindi teacher Marbom Ngomdir to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment each. Both had helped cover up the offences and failed to report them. Students had told Yorpen what was happening. He told them to stay quiet to protect the school's reputation. A special investigation team had found that Bagra had drugged students before assaulting them and had also threatened them to not speak out. Six of his victims attempted suicide. This abuse was discovered in late November 2022 when two sisters told their parents. Bagra fled to Itanagar and was arrested in December 2022. Later on, the Gauhati High Court annulled his bail order granted by the lower court.The.

In December 2024, police arrested a man in Itanagar for allegedly sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old girl who had been employed as domestic help, in a case registered under the POCSO Act.

Interstate sex trafficking

In early May 2024, the Arunachal Pradesh state police had broken up an interstate sex trafficking ring in Itanagar. During this operation, they rescued five girls aged between ten to fifteen, who had been trafficked from Dhemaji in Assam. As a result a total of twenty-one people were arrested. Among them were a deputy superintendent of police of the 1st Arunachal Armed Police Battalion, a deputy director of health services, two state-employed engineers, and a doctor.

Two sisters from Dhemaji ran the operation. They owned a beauty parlour in Itanagar and ran a brothel out of their home. Two hotels served as venues for the sexual exploitation. The sisters, along with two other women, coerced the girls into prostitution.

The Arunachal Pradesh State Commission for Women condemned the case. It said the involvement of government employees was a source of institutional shame. The Arunachal Pradesh Women's Welfare Society petitioned the Deputy Commissioner of Itanagar Capital Region to cancel licences for hotels and beauty parlours found to have facilitated trafficking.

In February 2026, Itanagar Police uncovered a separate interstate child trafficking network linking Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. The case began when police found a severely injured seven-year-old girl in Itanagar. Three more minor girls were rescued. Six people were arrested. Investigators found an organised system in which children were trafficked from Assam and sold through cash transactions with no legal adoption process, destined to work as domestic servants. The children were denied schooling, identity documents, and basic rights. At the time of reporting, two children were still missing.

Institutional capacity and enforcement

Arunachal Pradesh's child welfare infrastructure is widely regarded as too thin to address the scale of the problem. As of 2017, the state had only six Child Care Institutions. Two of them were not functioning. Of 21 Child Welfare Committees across the state, only those in Ziro, Lower Subansiri, and Itanagar were active. Child rights workers reported being threatened and abused by perpetrators. Sunil Mow of the Indian Council for Child Welfare's Arunachal Pradesh chapter said that adding more committees would not be enough without shelter homes and trained social workers to back them up.

As of 2022, Arunachal Pradesh had not joined the central government's scheme to set up Fast Track Special Courts for rape and POCSO cases. Only two other states or union territories had similarly failed to do so. Nationally, 90 per cent of POCSO cases remained pending as of 2022. Courts completed trials in only 12 per cent of cases.

A 2024 analysis by 360info found that at least 11 million children are trafficked for labour in India. Weak enforcement of laws and poor training of authorities continued to undermine protections even where comprehensive legislation existed. A 2017 ReliefWeb report by Caritas India identified northeast India as a hub for child trafficking, with child labour and sexual exploitation as the main drivers. Caritas India's anti-trafficking programme in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh covers 75 villages across five partner organisations.

See also

• Child labour in India
• Human trafficking in India
• Chakma people
• Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012