New Delhi: July 30 is the World Day against Trafficking in Persons, and the theme this year is as direct as it is urgent: “Human trafficking is Organized Crime – End the Exploitation”. Yet we still hear people ask, “Is trafficking really such a big issue?” “What can we really do about it?” Trafficking is any process that results in exploitation. In India, Article 23 of the Constitution prohibits trafficking as a fundamental right that prescribes punishment and criminality. Human trafficking is the second-largest crime in the world. It generates $150 billion a year, according to global estimates. One out of every three trafficked persons is a child.
With the advancement in communication, technology and permeation of social media, trafficking is no longer a poverty-driven issue. It has become an organised crime with the potential to enter our homes, here here and now. If today, we choose to look the other way we will become an ostrich, and also a part of the problem itself.
Trafficking Is Hidden In Plain Sight
Before we talk about laws and systems, we have to understand how trafficking operates around us — quietly, invisibly and often in ways that we refuse to acknowledge. A child can be trafficked anywhere through a message, a photograph, or a threat. Trafficking happens in our homes inadvertently when girls brought from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Bengal by unregistered placement agencies work as domestic help without contracts, wages or protection, often facing physical and sexual abuse that remains invisible behind closed doors.
Many times these acts are recorded and used to continue their exploitation through blackmail. We see this play out around us, and still, we remain ignorant. In Bihar, girls are trafficked under the pretext of orchestra performances. They are forced to dance at weddings and strip in front of crowds. Hundreds watch but no one speaks up. The truth is, trafficking hides behind excuses — poverty, helplessness, demand. The worst part is not that it's happening. It's that we see it and do nothing. Until people speak out, silence is violence.
Prosecution As A Tipping Point
India has one of the toughest anti-trafficking laws in the world. Traffic in human beings, begar and similar forms of forced labour are offences and must be punished by law. The Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS) defines trafficking as a stringent organised crime. Recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receiving a person through force, fraud, coercion, abduction or deception of a vulnerable person for exploitation is punishable by up to life imprisonment. Laws mean little to a child who is being exploited and remain meaningless unless enforced. Real protection lies not in legislation alone, but in its ability to reach those who need it most. This is where civil society has stepped in. Just Rights for Children's Access to Justice for Children programme, the largest civil society initiative against child exploitation and sexual abuse in the country, has shown what is possible when the rule of law is made real for the vulnerable.
Between April 2023 and March 2025, JRC achieved over 54,000 prosecutions across 28 states, rescuing more than 85,000 children, mostly from child labour. Centre for Legal Action and Behaviour Change (C-LAB) report, Building the Case for Zero: How Prosecution Acts as the Tipping Point to End Child Labour – The Case from India, drew data from 24 states to show prosecution is key to justice. As per the report, the Just Rights for Children network partners assisted in the rescue of 53,651 children from trafficking and kidnapping in 27,320 raids in 2024–25. Nearly 90 percent were in the worst forms of child labour.
Top states were Telangana, Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. In 2023, 18,774 prosecutions for human trafficking occurred worldwide, according to the 2024 U.S. TIP Report (India's data wasn't included). India alone had more than double that number in one year. This is scale. Scale is what organised crime demands. To combat trafficking, prevention must come before protection, protection before prosecution, and prosecution must create the deterrence that leads back to prevention.
Follow The Money, Break The Chain
Prosecution is the beginning of the end of trafficking. As to dismantle an organised crime, we must strike where it hurts. We must start with two principles: look beneath the surface and follow the money.
Every trafficked child is part of a chain: source, transit and destination. The trafficker is part of a system. The only way to stop the system is to break every link. That means prosecuting recruiters, transporters and buyers, not just employers. We must cut off the tentacles of trafficking by making it economically unviable — attaching properties, imposing fines, cancelling procurement, blacklisting repeat offenders and shutting down premises.
Without consequences, there is no deterrence. At the same time, we have to ensure long-term support and justice for survivors. We must identify vulnerable families and ensure every government scheme, scholarships, entitlements, protections, reach them. When a child is in school, they are far less likely to be trafficked. Therefore, ensuring universal access to education is critical. India has recognised education as a fundamental right until the age of 14. But to meaningfully reduce vulnerability, education must be free till 18.
A National Strategy With Local Action
Ending trafficking demands a nationwide push rooted in local intelligence. From data to digital tools, the response must be sharp, adaptive and led by those closest to the ground. India has one of the largest offender databases — the National Database of Sex Offenders (NDSO). It helps track patterns, identify hotspots and build heat maps of high-risk zones. This intelligence comes from survivors. They know who trafficked them. Use it. Share it. Act on it. At Just Rights for Children, our strategy follows the PICKET framework -- Policy, Institutional capacity, Convergence, Knowledge, Economics and Technology.
It begins with strong, clear Policy that supports zero tolerance to child labour and trafficking in supply chains of government and corporate procurement, nimble policies that adapt with the changing nature of trafficking and accountability for implementation of existing laws. Institutions must be equipped and mandated to monitor, prosecute offenders and support survivors in their recovery. From specialised anti-human trafficking units to local village panchayats maintaining migration registers, building institutional strength is critical.
Convergence across agencies is vital. NGOs, police, media and citizens must coordinate to share intelligence. Knowledge empowers children, families and communities to recognise and resist exploitation. Survivor insights provide powerful tools to dismantle trafficking networks. Economic deterrents such as attaching properties, imposing fines, cancelling procurement and blacklisting repeat offenders make trafficking financially risky. Technology is a powerful tool. Databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, heat maps and predictive analytics track traffickers, identify hotspots and predict movement patterns.
Facial recognition systems are already being used at some railway stations. They must be scaled up to identify sex offenders and traffickers. This is how a girl trafficked from West Bengal to the Andamans was rescued in 24 hours. A local NGO alerted police, who contacted the NGO at the destination, and everyone acted. That is coordination. The Railway Protection Force (RPF) has saved countless children at stations. Real-time alerts, trained officers, and shared intelligence make a huge difference.
What Can One Person Do?
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of trafficking, but real change often begins with individual action. We might ask, can one person really make a difference? Recently, one of my colleagues noticed a young girl crying at a traffic signal. Concerned, she stopped to check on her and discovered that the 15-year-old was a victim of child trafficking, rape, forced domestic labour and child marriage.
To hundreds of passersby, she was just another child, invisible in plain sight. But when someone finally stopped to help, that person became her saviour. If you think, one person can't change the world, think again, because the world has always been changed by one person at a time. See. Speak. Report. Act. If you see a child being exploited, speak up. Call the police. Call a helpline. Don't let it pass. What you do in that moment could mean the world to that child.
In massage parlours, spas, orchestras and placement agencies, our response must be faster and stronger. Institutions cannot do this alone. Civil society, media, families and communities have to act together. Political will exists, but enforcement and public resolve are key to ending trafficking. There are still 138 million children trapped in the worst forms of child labour around the world, according to estimates by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF. We have already missed our Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 deadline.
Today, India is leading by example — rescuing one child at a time, securing one prosecution at a time, holding one trafficker accountable at a time. It's time for the world to follow this model, because these 138 million children are not statistics, they are children. And the time to act is not tomorrow, it is now.
