The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 has been criticised for conflating voluntary sex work with trafficking and for its legislative silence on victims' rights. Examine the gaps in India's anti-trafficking legal framework and suggest reforms.

Q. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 has been criticised for conflating voluntary sex work with trafficking and for its legislative silence on victims' rights. Examine the gaps in India's anti-trafficking legal framework and suggest reforms. (15 marks, 250-350 words)

Article 23 elevates freedom from trafficking to a fundamental right, yet the governing statute — the ITPA, 1956 — predates India's Palermo Protocol obligations. In Prajwala v. Union of India (May 2026), the Supreme Court held that trafficking "emerges from within" migration flows, exposing a framework built on policing rather than protection [1].

Conflation of consent with criminality - ITPA penalises soliciting, brothel-keeping and living on earnings without any threshold inquiry into adult consent; the Court urged that consent become the driving distinction between exploitation and voluntary work [1]. - Consequence: adult sex workers are treated as offenders, victims are misidentified during raids, and stigma blocks access to health and legal remedies.

Legislative silence on victims' rights - No statutory entitlement to rehabilitation, compensation or repatriation; the Act is rescue-and-custody centric, prompting the Court to itself lay down pre-rescue, rescue and post-rescue protocols — a judicial substitute for missing legislation [1].

Fragmentation and definitional lag - ITPA covers only commercial sexual exploitation; labour, organ and forced-criminality trafficking sit scattered across IPC Sections 370–370A and the Bonded Labour Act. - The comprehensive Trafficking of Persons Bill, 2018 lapsed after Lok Sabha passage [2], leaving no unified law even as UNODC's GLOTIP 2024 records a 25% rise in detected victims and a 47% surge in forced-labour trafficking [3].

Administrative deficits - AHTUs, funded under the Nirbhaya Fund, remain unevenly staffed; repeated MHA advisories on inter-agency coordination signal persistent implementation gaps, as does weak operationalisation of MoUs with Bangladesh, UAE, Cambodia and Myanmar [4].

Way forward: enact a single Palermo-aligned statute [5] covering all forms of exploitation; decriminalise voluntary adult sex work while retaining strict penalties for coercion; create a statutory victim-compensation and rehabilitation fund with witness protection; and integrate migrant registration and source-district vigilance to attack vulnerability upstream.

Trafficking is ultimately a failure of livelihood security, not merely of policing. A rights-based, consent-sensitive law — pairing prosecution with protection — would finally align India's framework with Article 23's promise and SDG 8.7.

(~330 words)

Sources: 1. Prajwala v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India, 29 May 2026 — migration–trafficking linkage, ITPA's silence on adult consent, rescue/post-rescue guidelines 2. The Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018 — PRS Legislative Research — comprehensive Bill passed by Lok Sabha, subsequently lapsed 3. UNODC, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 — 25% rise in detected victims; 47% surge in forced-labour trafficking 4. MHA Advisory on Preventing and Combating Human Trafficking, F.No.15011/6/2009-ATC (18 October 2024) — AHTUs, inter-agency coordination, bilateral MoUs 5. UNODC, United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Trafficking in Persons Protocol — first global binding definition of trafficking