Note: This story contains references to child sexual abuse.
He was about 13 years old when 46 years old Ram Bhawan first gave him a mobile phone. Then came the money. Then the request: send me nude photographs and videos of yourself. When the boy refused to continue, Ram Bhawan told him what would happen next. He had older photos. He would show them to the boy's family. He would make them go viral on the internet.
"Out of fear, I kept sending him photos," the boy told a POCSO court in Banda, Uttar Pradesh. He never told his family. He was scared of the threats.
Later, Ram Bhawan's demands escalated further. He showed the boy pornographic videos and instructed him to perform the same acts with other children nearby — and film it. He was being coerced into becoming part of the production pipeline.
This is what made the Banda case different from an abuse case that stays within four walls. Ram Bhawan, a former junior engineer in the UP Irrigation Department, assaulted 33 children over eight years. He recorded everything — on camera, mobile phones, a laptop — and then distributed it to pornographic websites, the dark web and via email, to recipients in 47 countries including China and the United States. He stored material on cloud platforms including Mega.nz and Box.com. A pen drive recovered from his house contained 34 videos and 679 photographs of children being abused.
On 20 February 2026, a Special POCSO court in Banda sentenced Ram Bhawan and his wife Durgawati, 42, to death by hanging. POCSO court judge Pradeep Kumar Mishra delivered a 163-page verdict calling it a "rarest of the rare" case. Each victim who appeared before the court was awarded Rs 10 lakh in compensation.
The network, however, continues to exist.
How The Network Was Found
The thread that unravelled the case began when an engineer was found distributing Ram Bhawan’s videos on Meta platforms.
The CBI's Special Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (OCSAE) Unit, which monitors the distribution of child sexual abuse material across online platforms including parts of the dark web, had been tracking Neeraj Yadav, an engineer and resident of Anpara in Sonbhadra district.
Yadav had been running what investigators described as an online child pornography racket on Instagram since 2019, advertising the sale of CSAM, accepting payments through platforms like Paytm and Google Pay, and storing material across multiple cloud storage and file-hosting accounts using different email IDs. He was arrested in September 2020.
Among the material the CBI recovered was content Ram Bhawan had produced. The videos contained Ram Bhawan himself.
To identify and locate the man in the footage, the CBI sought international cooperation through Interpol. Interpol shared intelligence indicating that India-linked accounts were suspected of uploading videos and images depicting the sexual assault of minors on pornographic websites, and alerted investigators to the circulation of emails and other child sexual abuse material among multiple users.
It provided three email IDs and phone numbers, along with a pen drive containing sexually explicit videos and photographs. The CBI examined the material, linked it to Ram Bhawan, and registered the case on 31 October 2020.
When the phone numbers were traced, they led to Ram Bhawan, then posted in the JalKal department in Chitrakoot. He was arrested on 16 November 2020. His wife Durgawati was arrested six weeks later, on 28 December 2020, after videos involving her were also found.
Prosecution lawyer Kamal Singh told Decode, "The CBI received information from Interpol that a person was using three phone numbers to make pornographic videos involving young children and upload them online."
The agency filed a chargesheet in February 2021. The trial lasted four years. Seventy-four prosecution witnesses appeared before the court, including 25 victims.
The case rested heavily on digital forensics. During a search of Ram Bhawan's house in Banda, investigators recovered nude photographs of children, a camera, pen drives, multiple mobile phones, recording devices, a diary, alleged sexually explicit material, and approximately Rs 8.27 lakh in cash.
What Happened in Those Houses
Ram Bhawan operated from three locations over nearly a decade: a house in Jawahar Nagar, Nairaini in Banda district; a rented house in Kapsethi, where he lived with his wife; and later, the SDM Colony in Chitrakoot.
His victims were boys from poor families in the neighbourhood — sons of domestic workers, milk vendors, labourers. He lured them with mobile phones, video games, toys, chocolates and cash. The court judgment stated that he specifically targeted children from economically vulnerable families.
One boy told the court he had been in Class 4 when Ram Bhawan took him to his house and kept him there for five days. He showed the child videos and toys, then sexually assaulted him repeatedly. "He also showed me videos of other children he had abused," the boy said. "When I came back home, I was too scared to tell anyone."
Another boy — who had been delivering milk to the house, whose father had also sent him there to learn how to use a laptop — described what happened to him and his brothers. "Uncle used to sexually assault me in the bedroom, bathroom and verandah of his house. He did the same with my brothers too. He recorded everything — he made photos and videos of all of us." He told the court that Durgawati was present throughout. "She knew everything but never stopped him."
Among the 33 victims was a child who was three years old at the time. His mother, who worked as a domestic helper at Ram Bhawan's house, broke down in court when video evidence of her son's abuse was played. Her son could not speak — he communicated only through gestures. He had indicated severe pain in his lower body. The judgment noted that physical consequences of the assault, including squint eyes and other injuries, continued to affect the child long after the incident.
Medical examinations of child victims revealed clear physical signs of repeated penetrative sexual assault, documented over a prolonged period. These reports were presented as key forensic evidence before the court.
The Infrastructure of Distribution
What the Banda case maps, in specific and documented detail, is how abuse material travels once it leaves a bedroom in Chitrakoot.
The tools Ram Bhawan used were not exotic. A camera. Mobile phones. A laptop. A cloud storage account on Mega.nz, another on Box.com. An email client. These are not dark web specialisms, they are instruments available to anyone with a broadband connection. The dark web component came later, as a destination for upload, not as the mechanism of access.
The use of Mega.nz and Box.com — legitimate, widely used file-sharing and cloud storage platforms — is consistent with a pattern documented by child safety researchers globally. Perpetrators routinely exploit the scale and relative anonymity of mainstream platforms before moving material to more obscure networks, often by the time a report is filed the content has migrated multiple times.
The scale of the problem these platforms sit within is substantial. According to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), 2024 recorded the highest-ever number of web pages hosting child sexual abuse imagery, with 291,273 reports of CSAM in EU countries alone. In India, the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) had recorded 1.94 lakh complaints related to child pornography or rape as of 30 April 2024.
India's position within this global picture is not incidental. A 2019 New York Times investigation, citing data from the American nonprofit National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), reported that 1,987,430 pieces of CSAM were attributed to India — the highest figure for any country.
A Decode investigation published in July 2024 found CSAM circulating actively on platforms accessible to Indian users, with Instagram accounts posting sexualised images of Indian children and directing users to Telegram channels where abuse material was sold for as little as Rs 40. In any given week, searches for child sexual abuse content on Telegram received between 20,000 and 40,000 views in India alone.
The cross-border dimension of the Banda case adds another layer of complexity. Brijesh Singh, former head of cybersecurity in Maharashtra, told Decode that perpetrators use advanced encryption, proxies and Tor networks to evade detection, and that the volume of CSAM shared online makes it difficult for law enforcement to keep pace.
"Investigations are further complicated as CSAM can be shared across international borders, requiring coordination and information-sharing between law enforcement agencies across the world," he said. Some platforms, he noted, have robust content moderation policies; others are slower to respond to Indian law enforcement requests.
The Defence, and the Verdict
Ram Bhawan and Durgawati denied all charges. Defence lawyer Bhura Prasad Nishad told Decode the verdict would be challenged in the High Court. "There is no medical evidence in this case and no DNA test was conducted," he said.
He pointed to the absence of required videography for victim statements under Section 161 CrPC, alleged that no injuries were found on any victim's body, and noted that no complaint had been filed against Ram Bhawan in the eight years the abuse allegedly took place. He also alleged that a family dispute — involving Ram Bhawan's brother-in-law and a claimed threat to frame him using CBI contacts — lay behind the case.
The court was unmoved. Rejecting the defence's plea for mercy, judge Mishra said the crimes — committed over nearly a decade against more than 30 children, some as young as three — fell in the "rarest of rare" category. The victims are still suffering mentally, the court found, and a lesser sentence would harm public trust in the justice system.
Ram Bhawan was sentenced to death under the POCSO Act and to life imprisonment under IPC Section 377. Durgawati received the death sentence for her role.
What the Verdict Cannot Reach
A conviction and sentence address what happened inside those houses in Banda and Chitrakoot. They cannot address where the videos went.
The 34 videos and 679 photographs recovered from the pen drive became evidence in a courtroom. But material uploaded to the dark web, shared by email to 47 countries, stored on cloud platforms — that content is not bounded by the jurisdiction of a POCSO court in Banda. A death sentence for the man who created it does not remove it from the servers it reached.
Child psychologist Indu Punj, who works with survivors of abuse, says this digital permanence compounds the psychological harm in ways that are difficult to treat. "Such abuse can harm a child for their entire life. These children need regular counseling and therapy sessions, along with strong mental health support, so they can recover from the trauma," she told Decode.
The knowledge that images of one's abuse may be circulating online indefinitely — viewable by strangers, shareable without limit — is its own form of ongoing victimisation, distinct from the original assault and in some ways harder to address. Removing material from one platform does not guarantee its disappearance; it frequently resurfaces elsewhere.
"Children from poor or vulnerable families are often at higher risk," Punj said, "especially when parents work long hours, when there is a single parent, or when there are no parents at all."
In Banda, Ram Bhawan's victims were precisely these children — from families whose economic precarity meant the promise of a mobile phone or a toy carried real weight, and whose parents could not always know where their sons had gone.
(The names of the accused are as stated in court records. The names and identifying details of victims have not been included in this report.)
This story has been edited by Adrija Bose