The Impact of Anti-Human Trafficking Units: A Collaborative Approach to Combat Trafficking

Human trafficking is one of the most complex crimes to investigate and prosecute – it crosses district lines, state borders, and sometimes international boundaries, and its victims are often too frightened or traumatized to cooperate with authorities. No single agency can effectively address it alone. That is exactly why India’s Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs) were designed the way they were – not as standalone police units, but as multi-agency platforms where law enforcement, government departments, and civil society organizations work in tandem. This collaborative architecture is central to understanding both the promise and the ongoing challenges of AHTUs in India’s fight against trafficking.

What are Anti-Human Trafficking Units? 🔗

AHTUs are specialized law enforcement units established by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to investigate and respond to human trafficking at the district level. They originated as a pilot project in 2006 in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), initially operating in five states. The model proved effective enough that the MHA formalized and expanded it through a Comprehensive Scheme in 2010, envisioning AHTUs in every vulnerable district across the country.

By 2020, 696 AHTUs had been established across various states and Union Territories, with the central government providing approximately ₹100 crore from the Nirbhaya Fund to strengthen existing units and set up new ones. The 2024 US Trafficking in Persons Report notes that by that year the government reported operating 788 AHTUs, including 30 with border security forces – though the number of genuinely functional, fully-resourced units is considerably lower.

The integrated, multi-agency structure 🔗

The defining feature of the AHTU model is its integrated composition. Rather than being a purely police-run unit, each AHTU is designed as a task force that brings together officials from multiple government departments alongside civil society representatives. The MHA scheme envisioned each unit comprising police personnel alongside representatives from the Women and Child Development department, Health and Family Welfare, Labour and Employment, and prosecution departments.

On the civil society side, each AHTU is formally partnered with a nodal NGO identified by the state police, which can in turn associate up to two additional local NGOs as needed. This is not an informal arrangement – in states like West Bengal, the relationship between CID and NGO partners is formalized through a Memorandum of Contract that specifies the roles and responsibilities of each party. The NGO partners are required to participate in rescue and post-rescue operations, provide legal support inside and outside court, offer shelter access, deliver trauma counseling, and share research findings with the unit.

This structure is grounded in legislative mandate. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 (ITPA) explicitly envisages NGO involvement at multiple stages – from advising the Special Police Officer on ITPA implementation, to assisting magistrates in determining interim custody of rescued persons, to conducting home verification before a victim is returned to their family.

The three Ps: Prevention, protection, and prosecution 🔗

AHTUs operate under a comprehensive mandate structured around what is commonly called the “3 P” framework” – Prevention, Protection, and Prosecution. Understanding how the collaborative model operates within each of these pillars explains why multi-agency cooperation is indispensable.

Prevention 🔗

Prevention requires community-level outreach in source areas – villages and districts where people are most vulnerable to traffickers. Police alone rarely have the grassroots networks or social credibility to carry this out effectively. NGO partners bring community trust, local language capacity, and experience working with marginalized groups. In states like Odisha and Jharkhand, NGOs embedded in tribal and migrant communities have been instrumental in running awareness campaigns, distributing helpline information, and working with panchayats to flag suspicious recruitment activity. The UNODC’s Compendium of Best Practices on Anti-Human Trafficking documents several such collaborative models where NGOs and government agencies jointly addressed source-area vulnerabilities.

Protection 🔗

Identifying trafficking victims is genuinely difficult. Victims are frequently misidentified as illegal migrants, runaways, or willing participants in commercial activity. Research published in BMC Public Health found that every AHTU in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh had an appointed nodal NGO that helped law enforcement identify victims and coordinate post-trafficking care, including managing shelter homes for rehabilitation. Once a victim is rescued, AHTUs coordinate with Child Welfare Committees, shelter homes, and NGO counselors to provide trauma-informed care, legal aid, and compensation under schemes like the Nirbhaya Fund.

The MHA scheme also provides a dedicated victim support fund of up to ₹1 lakh per year for pre-rescue and rescue operations – covering food, clothing, medicines, and psycho-legal support for victims in the immediate aftermath of a rescue.

Prosecution 🔗

AHTUs are designed to build prosecution-ready cases. This involves financial investigations to trace money trails, digital evidence collection, careful victim and witness documentation, and framing charges under the correct provisions – whether the Indian Penal Code, the ITPA, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO), or other applicable laws. Unlike general police stations that handle dozens of crime types, AHTUs maintain specialized focus on trafficking, which allows personnel to develop expertise in these technically demanding investigations. Survivor testimonies collected by Tafteesh and Sanjog consistently noted that AHTU officers were more patient, respectful, and skilled at gathering usable evidence than general police – directly improving prosecution outcomes.

Intelligence and data coordination 🔗

AHTUs also serve a critical data function. They act as grassroots nodes for building databases on traffickers and trafficking networks. Information collected by AHTUs is relayed to District and State Crime Records Bureaus and ultimately to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), enabling a national-level picture of trafficking patterns. This intelligence-sharing function is especially important given that – as the US TIP Report 2024 notes – approximately 90% of trafficking in India is inter-state in nature, meaning that no single district or state can effectively investigate these networks in isolation.

The government also operates the Crime Multi Agency Center (Cri-MAC), a national communication platform designed to share missing persons and trafficking case data across states. However, the same report notes that many states do not effectively utilize this system, and AHTU officials across multiple states have highlighted the absence of exclusive communication channels between AHTUs within and across state lines.

What the data tells us: progress and persistent gaps 🔗

The collaborative AHTU model has produced real results where it functions properly. UNODC data from early AHTU operations showed 934 trafficking cases registered, 372 rescue operations conducted, and 194 traffickers and exploiters arrested – outcomes directly attributable to the multi-agency model.

However, the gap between the model on paper and its implementation on the ground remains significant. A landmark study by Sanjog and Tafteesh, based on RTI responses from 33 states and UTs, found that only 27% of AHTUs are genuinely functional, and only 51% have been formally notified with all required powers and resources. Responses from 16 states showed that 225 AHTUs exist only on paper. Only seven states – Bihar, Kerala, Nagaland, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Uttarakhand – have AHTUs covering all their districts.

The 2024 TIP Report identifies several structural reasons for this: state governments have been reluctant to fund recurring operational costs after the initial central government setup, many AHTUs are not solely dedicated to trafficking crimes and drift toward handling other offences against children, and some states have not given AHTUs independent authority to register trafficking FIRs – forcing them to transfer cases to general police who may lack the necessary training.

Key recommendations for strengthening the collaborative model 🔗

Despite the gaps, the AHTU framework remains one of the most well-designed institutional responses to trafficking that India has developed. Strengthening it requires action on several fronts. Enhanced and consistent training through the Bureau of Police Research and Development’s Training of Trainers (ToT) program is essential. Clear mandates that restrict AHTUs to trafficking crimes – rather than diluting their focus – would improve their effectiveness. A centralized digital database and exclusive communication portal connecting AHTUs across districts and states could transform intelligence sharing. And critically, researchers who have studied the Bihar and UP models emphasize that empowering survivors and deepening NGO-government coordination – rather than treating them as afterthoughts – are the most sustainable paths forward.

The National Commission for Women’s 2022 initiative to build AHTU capacity and develop standardized SOPs on victim identification is a step in the right direction, as are the MOU-based cooperation agreements between states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana on cross-border data sharing.

The collaborative model as a benchmark 🔗

India’s AHTU model – when implemented as designed – is one of the clearest examples of a whole-of-government approach to a transnational crime. It recognizes that the state alone cannot prevent trafficking, protect survivors, or successfully prosecute traffickers without the capacities that NGOs, civil society, and community networks bring to the table. The UNODC’s protocol for Integrated AHTUs explicitly frames the unit’s purpose as bringing about inter-agency collaboration among government agencies and non-state actors – ensuring a human rights approach, a victim-centric approach, a gender-sensitive approach, and an organized crime perspective all at once. That is an ambitious mandate, and one that requires sustained political will, adequate funding, and genuine partnership to deliver.

What do you think? Given that only 27% of AHTUs are genuinely functional despite being established for over a decade, what should be the priority – strengthening existing units or expanding coverage to new districts? And how can the structured NGO-police partnership model built into AHTUs be better replicated in states where civil society organizations remain sidelined from official anti-trafficking efforts?

References

1. https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/Scheme-AHTU-SS-271011.pdf
2. https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/India_Training_material/Protocol_on_AHTU.pdf
3. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1794796
4. https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-report/india/
5. https://www.unodc.org/pdf/india/iahtu_241207.pdf
6. https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/India_Training_material/Compendium_of_Best_Practices_by_NGOs.pdf
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8223280/
8. https://www.businessworld.in/article/rti-responses-highlights-that-only-27-of-ahtus-are-functional-51-being-notified-with-all-power-and-resources-study-310622
9. https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/Marika-Misc/Technical%20Assistance%20-%20India.pdf
10. https://www.tafteesh.org/press-release-detail.php?srno=72&title=Only-27%25-of-AHTUs-are-functional-51%25-being-notified-with-all-power-and-resources:-Study
11. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12889-021-11213-w