Training Law Enforcement in Northeast India to Combat Human Trafficking

By Hasina Kharbhih

In 1956, India's government passed the immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act, which called for law enforcement training to prevent human trafficking.

Five decades later, Impulse conducted a needs assessment survey to study the state of human trafficking in the eight Northeast states.

The study showed that there was little training available to law enforcement officers, and that human trafficking in the Northeast was a flourishing industry that law enforcement largely ignored.

Small, homegrown NGOs like Impulse could not eradicate trafficking in persons (TIP) on their own; law enforcement is a necessary force to end TIP.

To improve law enforcement's response to TIP, Impulse partnered with the North Eastern Police Academy to design and implement effective training courses and materials for officers in the eight Northeast states.

Impulse staff traveled to all state police academies to conduct trainings on TIP prevention; create links between police, local NGOs/CBOs, and government personnel; and collaborate on the design of a training handbook on TIP. By 2007 the handbook was published.

In the four years since Impulse began working with law enforcement, it has trained hundreds of officers throughout the Northeast states, and its handbook is part of every state law enforcement agency's compulsory training curriculum for officers-in-training. Local NGOs are no longer alone in fighting TIP; Impulse's intervention has led to the creation of a network spanning the eight Northeast states.

Police officers and border security personnel are now aware of TIP, have tools to detect TIP, follow standardized reporting procedures to document TIP, and work through well-defined channels to follow up on TIP-related crimes.

Law enforcement regularly partners with civil society organizations on its anti-TIP efforts, so the impacts of police's TIP detection and prosecution are augmented by NGOs/CBOs' prevention and victim rehabilitation activities.

Their cognizance has aided in the creation of a digital TIP database to document activity and follow-up in the Northeast, which has further strengthened the Northeast regional network.

Via Changemakers