New Delhi: At a time when India has been witnessing a huge spike in human trafficking cases, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has castigated several States and Union Territories (UTs) for lack of awareness and training on the issue of human trafficking.
In a recent meeting of nodal officers of all States and UTs, dealing with human trafficking, it was found that concerned officers in States and UTs sometimes lack awareness and training, and at times fail to register cases under relevant Sections of IPC, "resulting in ineffective prosecution and conviction rate."
The meeting which was chaired by Shyamal Mishra, additional secretary, women's safety has sent letters to the Director General of Police (DGPs) of all States and UTs asking them to motivate and update the knowledge base of the officers dealing with human trafficking.
"States need to make special efforts and provide them adequate training and resource materials, etc on a periodic basis. In case, the States need any specific training resources, the same can be organized by Bureau and Police Research Development," the MHA said.
The MHA said that strengthening cooperation and establishing inter-state channels of communication is essential, and the States and UTs need to work in close coordination with each other.
The MHA through its letter sent to the State DGPs asked the law enforcement agencies to take actions under Sections 366A (procuration of minor girls), Section 366-B (importation of girls from a foreign country), Section 372 (selling of girls for prostitution) and Section 373 (buying of girls for prostitution) against the people involved in human trafficking.
The Central government understands that human trafficking is a grave crime and attaches high importance to the efforts directed at preventing and countering such crime. "Human trafficking is a highly organized crime often involving inter-state gangs," the MHA said.
The MHA has reiterated that it supports organizing judicial colloquiums and state-level conferences to sensitize the judicial officers and law enforcement agencies and key stakeholders on wide-ranging issues relating to the trafficking of persons. MHA also provides Rs 2 lakh funds for holding judicial colloquiums and state-level conferences.
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The meeting of the nodal officers also emphasized the use of the Cri-MAC (crime multi-agency center) application for inter-state coordination amongst law enforcement agencies of all States and UTs. Cri-MAC which was launched in 2020, facilitates the dissemination of information about significant crimes including human trafficking across the country on a real-time basis and enables inter-state coordination.
This can, inter-alia, help in locating and identifying the trafficked victims as also in prevention, detection, and investigation of crimes. Ever since the portal was launched, as many as 35145 alerts have been uploaded to the portal with Delhi top of the list of States and UTs with 10931 alerts followed by Haryana at 8237 and Kerala at 2685.
As per the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, a total of 2189 cases of human trafficking were registered in 2021 as compared to 1714 cases in the year 2020, showing an increase of 27.7 percent. A total of 6533 victims have been reported to be trafficked 2877 children and 3656 adults.
Apart from this, 6213 victims have been rescued from the clutches of traffickers and 5755 people were arrested in 2189 cases of trafficking. According to the NCRB data, the highest number of human trafficking cases have been registered in Telangana (347), followed by Maharashtra (320) and Assam (203) cases.
