Promised school, put to work: The case of Assam’s absconding POCSO accused

In 2021, Xewali* travelled from Tezpur to Guwahati to meet her eldest daughter, who worked as a domestic helper at a residence in Palashbari, under the Kamrup district of Assam. Xewali had no idea that this visit would upend her younger daughter’s life. 

Next door lived Santanu Kumar Nath, an executive engineer with the Public Works Department (PWD) in the Assam Government. During her visit, Nath approached Xewali with an unusual proposition: he would take her 13-year-old daughter, Pahi*, as a ‘live-in companion’ for his elderly mother; in return, he ensured education for the girl. 

“His words were, ‘Ami tu dangor manuh hoi, ami tu porham e taik. Eku sinta koribo nalage’(We are rich and respectable people. We will definitely provide her education. You don’t have to worry at all),’” Xewali told EastMojo in an interview.

For Xewali, who had never stepped into a classroom, money was never the point. Coming from the Adivasi community in Tezpur and surviving as a daily wage worker in the tea gardens, Xewali had just one dream for her youngest daughter— better education and a safer environment, away from her own world.

“I trusted him [Nath], thinking my daughter Pahi would be going to school and have a better future,” shares Xewali. 

However, the fleeting promise vanished too soon.

Over the next five years, Nath made no effort to enrol Pahi in any school. Instead, she spent days doing household chores from dawn to dark, facing ill-treatment from Nath and his wife, and no wages for her labour ever reaching her mother. 

“Every time I called Nath, I asked him the same question: Dada, suali joni je porham buli koisile…schoolo’t ketiya ke pothabo? (Brother, you promised to educate Pahi, so when will you send her to school?) But he always had an excuse. Sometimes the school was closed, sometimes the teachers were on leave, or the school had not yet opened,” Xewali told EastMojo.

According to multiple studies, the gross enrolment ratio among children from tea-garden communities in Assam is one of the lowest, and the dropout rate is higher than the state’s overall average, particularly among girls. 

Earlier this year, Pahi, who is 16 now[as per the FIR], called her mother, insisting she would visit her soon, something she had never done in all these years. When Xewali finally visited in August, Nath gave her Rs.10,000, apparently the first payment for her daughter’s labour to reach the family. 

Pahi, however, shared nothing except that she was “fine” in the presence of Nath’s wife, who was constantly eavesdropping on them. Xewali, though, took notice when the wife threatened to slap the girl if she did not “learn to behave.”  

“I confronted madam and asked why she was threatening to hurt my daughter and taunting her constantly. To which madam explained that if she didn’t scold her, Pahi would become uncontrollable,” the mother told EastMojo.

However, little did she know that her daughter was allegedly enduring sexual abuse and desperately wanted to escape.

Pahi’s ordeal broke on the night of August 24, when she climbed over the gate of her employer’s residence and fled to save herself from the alleged sexual assault. 

Her mother Xewali, told EastMojo that after escaping from the house, Pahi tried to jump into a pond to “end her life,” terrified she would be sent back to Nath. 

The local people and Village Defence Party members spotted her and alerted the wife. The VDP then handed over Pahi to the Palashbari police.  

At around 1:50 am on August 25, the police brought Pahi to Navajeevan Rehabilitation Home run by the Assam Centre for Rural Development (ACRD).

“Everyone started hounding her with questions. She got terrified and thought of ending her life…She sprained her hand in the process as locals pulled her to prevent her from jumping,” shared her mother.

During counselling at the shelter, Pahi revealed that she had been repeatedly sexually abused by her employer, Santanu Kumar Nath, 53, and threatened her with grave consequences if she told anyone. 

The next day, she was produced before the Child Welfare Committee, Kamrup. However, only a general diary entry dated August 24 was registered, not an FIR (First Information Report.

Police later told the ACRD that the matter came under the jurisdiction of Azara Police Station, Kamrup Metropolitan, so it had to be transferred, including to the CWC of Kamrup Metropolitan.

On August 26, the girl was brought before the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) in Kamrup. Two days later, a sub-inspector from Azara police station was assigned to record her statement.

While the child was in protective custody, Nath came looking for the mother. 

On August 28, Nath turned up at Xewali’s lodging in Guwahati and told her that Pahi was in jail. Until then she had no idea about her daughter’s situation. 

“First, he hesitated to speak up, and then he went on to warn me that I should caution my daughter against defaming him by saying ‘he had done bad things to her,’ and that she had run away of her own will, not because of the abuse. Also, he said her statement could land both him and her in trouble,” Xewali told EastMojo.

Then he handed her a small bag—Rs.50,000 in cash.

“Keep this money. I will give you more tomorrow. Build your house in the village and live there with your daughter once she comes back from jail. But tell her not to testify against me,” —Xewali recalled him saying. 

When she asked why her daughter was picked up by the police, he simply replied that she had been placed in a “police ashram” ( shelter home) and that she could meet her soon.

That same day, a man arrived at Xewali’s house carrying a message from Nath: she was needed at the police station.

She went voluntarily, feeling that her daughter’s case was finally progressing. Instead of the police station, the vehicle stopped outside a small court. Strangers handed her a document with passport-size images of her and Pahi and asked her to sign it. She complied despite her confusion and fear, as no one else was there to explain. 

Only later did she discover that she had signed an affidavit declaring Pahi’s age to be 21—an adult, not a minor anymore with their signatures allegedly obtained by deception. A copy of the affidavit is with EastMojo.

Xewali finally met her daughter on August 30. 

“My heart was racing. Even though everyone had told me what happened to my daughter, I wanted to see her and hear it directly from her,” the mother shared, adding that Pahi had also told her mother that she was forced to administer contraceptive pills after every sexual encounter, “otherwise Nath would beat her for refusing it,” the mother told EastMojo.

EastMojo found that there was a delay in her statutory medical examination Medico-Legal Case(MLC). A police official did come on August 29 to take Pahi for a court-ordered medical examination, but the procedure was never conducted. Instead, she was transferred to a women’s shelter home in Jalukbari. 

When she was produced before the CWC, Kamrup Metropolitan, on August 31, the committee indicated it would order a bone-ossification test to establish her age.

Nine days passed before police finally registered an FIR. On September 3, an FIR was finally lodged against Nath at the Azara police station after her mother filed a complaint, and the Assam Tea Tribe Students’ Association (ATTSA) pressed the administration to act. 

Police eventually registered a case against Nath under Sections 115 (2), 64 (2) (f), 238 and 351(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, along with Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012.

As of September 14, accused Santanu Kumar Nath, a serving PWD executive engineer, remains at large. Xewali shares that she feels threatened, alleging that many people linked to Nath have contacted her to ‘influence the case’, including his mother, who sent word through someone seeking to meet her.

When EastMojo contacted the first Investigating Officer, Ekham Seng Bannu of Palashbari Police Station, to enquire about the delay in arrest, she stated that ‘Nath was absconding,’ but offered no further explanation or details on the steps taken to locate and arrest him.

EastMojo has also requested a right to reply from the CWC and the Superintendent of Police in Kamrup Metropolitan. The story will be updated once we receive the responses.

According to human rights lawyer Liyi Marli Noshi, police must make every reasonable attempt to identify an accused person charged under Section 6 of the POCSO Act, including issuing public notices and alerting relevant authorities. 

“Police must issue public notices, publish his details in newspapers and on social media, and inform relevant government departments that he is wanted in this case [POCSO case],” Noshi told EastMojo. 

Noshi further shared that this case also raises concerns about child trafficking because the girl was reportedly “harboured on the promise of an education” if only she stayed as a companion to Nath’s elderly mother. 

“This angle of child trafficking should not be ignored if evidence supports it. The police should investigate it, and add relevant sections as well,” she said.   

High Reported Cases, Low Convictions

Xewali’s case is not an isolated incident in Assam, where official figures point to a persistent pattern of sexual violence against children.

Between 2021 and 2023, Assam logged 6,054 cases of sexual abuse against children under the POCSO Act: 1,926 in 2021, 1,703 in 2022 and 2,425 in 2023, as per the information provided by the state government figures given to the state assembly by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pijush Hazarika.

However, only 299 people were convicted, and 2,244 arrests were made. Assam had 3,881 pending POCSO cases as of late 2022, the highest in the northeast.

Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2023 shows that Assam registered more crimes against children than any other state in India, with 10,174 cases— a rate of 84.2 for every one lakh children, significantly exceeding the national average of 39.9 (67,694 cases nationally).

Survivors’ Long Road To Closure

For years, Assam has witnessed the systematic exploitation of minor girls from marginalised communities, particularly tea tribes and Adivasi groups. They have been subjected to trafficking, bonded labour, and sexual assault, with less intervention from law enforcement, while many incidents go completely undocumented.  

Poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and a lack of awareness compel many families to send their daughters to work as domestic servants in city households, often for little or no pay, cutting short their education and leaving them exposed to abuse from a young age. And the conviction rate is almost negligible.

A special POCSO court in Kokrajhar, Assam, sentenced a man to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment on September 11 for raping a minor who was studying in Class 10 at the time of the offence in 2022. It took four years for the accused to be punished.

An eight-year-old girl from a destitute family in Sarengjan village, near the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border, was rescued in Arunachal Pradesh after two videos showing her being assaulted went viral on social media. She was trafficked by Biri Tara of Kamle district via a trafficker with the promise of education, but was instead kept as a domestic helper and subjected to repeated torture. 

The All Bodo Students Union and Aijo Anfai Afad, a Bodo women’s organisation, have demanded that the accused be punished under the POCSO Act of 2012 and that compensation be granted to the victim’s family.

Then there’s Chumi, who was 15 when her uncle sold her to a trafficker in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, in 2016. She fled after three years. Nearly a decade later, the accused remain free.

Eight-year-old Nirmala comes from Seajuli Tea Estate in Lakhimpur. She was trafficked to a cardamom plantation in Kamle district in Arunachal Pradesh, where her captor, Hagu Palang, confined her for years. She became pregnant at 13 and could return home only in late 2019. By then, she was a young woman with two children born in bondage. Police took no action after her return.

Neha’s captivity stretched across two decades. Trafficked as a child from Boroi Tea Estate in Biswanath to Pakeng in Arunachal Pradesh, she was abused by many men in the family she was married into and returned to her parents only in 2021, with a seven-year-old daughter.

And then there is Jawny of Koilamari Tea Estate in Lakhimpur, who has waited twenty-five years for her eldest daughter Carmella. She was sold by her father at the age of six, presumably to Delhi. Her face exists nowhere now but in her mother’s memory. No one has been held to account.

The pattern across these cases points to a systemic failure in Assam, one that persists not because perpetrators are hard to identify, but because accountability is rarely pursued in the matter of child sexual abuse.

To protect their identity, all the victims’ names have been changed, even those highlighted with an asterisk.

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