NEW DELHI: Rare animal trafficking is rising in India, with the discovery of five baby orangutans abandoned in a forest in the eastern state of Odisha exposing what wildlife experts describe as a massive and increasingly lucrative trade in exotic animals.
Experts warn that a multimillion-dollar illegal trade in endangered species is expanding as demand grows among wealthy Indians seeking exotic animals as status symbols, with social media helping to promote their ownership.
The five orangutans, aged about one-and-a-half years, were found by forest rangers in Balasore district. The critically endangered animals are native only to Indonesia’s Sumatra island and the islands of Borneo, which is shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
The orangutans are currently being cared for at a zoo, while Indonesia has requested that they be returned. Police have launched a criminal investigation into how the animals reached Odisha.
Sumanth Bindumadhav of Humane World for Animals India said the discovery was part of a wider pattern of exotic wildlife being seized across India. “The scale is massive,” he said.
In a June 2026 report, his organisation described a “rising trade in exotic wildlife”, pointing to a steep increase in seizures as evidence of a surge in illegal trafficking.
The report estimated India’s exotic-pet market at $42.6 million in 2024 and said small apes, including orangutans and gibbons, were increasingly being trafficked into India from the rainforests of Southeast Asia.
A senior official with India’s Wildlife Crime Control Bureau said thousands of social media influencers were promoting exotic species as pets online, helping to fuel demand among their followers.
“It is a huge market,” the official said, requesting anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
Government data shows that more than 40,000 people had registered exotic animals under a voluntary disclosure scheme by February 2021. Wildlife experts say the figure may represent only a fraction of exotic animals being kept privately.
“The true volume of it is potentially much larger and remains unknown,” Bindumadhav said. “The true scale of it is actually quite frightening.”
Shekhar Kumar Niraj, former head of the global anti-wildlife-trafficking organisation TRAFFIC in India, said the rise in trafficking was also linked to an increasing number of exotic animals being kept in private collections.
“Private zoos have violated laws at a very alarming scale across the country,” he said, adding that primates were particularly popular because of their intelligence and interaction with humans.
Indian federal authorities have not commented yet on the issue. The World Wide Fund for Nature-India documented 56 seizures involving about 4,000 exotic animals in 2022 alone.
In October 2025, Mumbai customs officials arrested a passenger carrying two endangered gibbons concealed inside a checked bag. Other seizures in Mumbai included lizards, tree-climbing possums and dozens of venomous vipers.
Forest officials also recovered a trafficked orangutan from a flat in Maharashtra in 2024. Wildlife experts, however, say seizure figures capture only a small part of the illegal trade. “The scale of it is much, much bigger than what we see actually based on the seizure data,” said Jimmy Borah of environmental advocacy group Aaranyak.
Experts have also previously raised concerns about Vantara, a large wildlife rescue and conservation centre in Gujarat founded by Anant Ambani, the son of billionaire Mukesh Ambani, over its intake of endangered species. Vantara has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
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In August, Vantara said it was taking “bold steps to reset its operations”, had withdrawn all applications to import live animals and appointed former CITES chief John Scanlon to chair its governing council.
The route used to bring the five orangutans to Odisha remains unclear. Experts say that, besides airports and formal cargo routes, India’s land border with Myanmar in the northeast is an important route for trafficking exotic wildlife from Southeast Asia.
“The northeast is important for seizures of live exotic animals, linked to cross-border movement from Southeast Asia,” said Dipankar Ghose of WWF-India. Authorities have seized other exotic primates in the region in recent years, with some smuggled along jungle routes across the frontier. “We are talking about miles and miles of a very porous border,” Borah said.
