On the morning of July 19, the same day that a video clip of the sexual assault on women in Manipur went viral and shook the country, social media threw up another series of disturbing images. Except these were from a middle-class neighbourhood in Delhi, and featured a couple, the woman in pilot’s uniform, being thrashed by about 15 people, including women. A few videos focused on an emaciated child, who had burn marks on her arm, injuries on her face, and blood in her left eye. She looked scared, lost, and disoriented.
The same morning, Delhi Police said the couple — Poornima Bagchi, 33, an IndiGo pilot, and Kaushik Bagchi, 36, an aviation engineer with Vistara — were accused of hiring the 10-year-old girl from the video as a stay-at-home help to care for their four-year-old son. The police said she had been physically and mentally assaulted on multiple occasions. The girl’s family and neighbours came together, pulled the couple out of the four-storey building in Dwarka, where Poornima and her husband live in a two-bedroom rented apartment, and beat them up.
“Apart from taking care of the boy, they forced her to do other household chores — cleaning, washing clothes and utensils, and even cooking sometimes. They regularly tortured her, thrashing her, and burning her with an iron,” says a senior police officer. Her family says no wages were paid. According to Delhi Police data, 311 children have been rescued from factories and domestic work so far in 2023.
