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.

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.