Curbing human trafficking in India's Assam through outreach and awareness

The problem: Being close to multiple international and state borders, Assam faces the scourge of human trafficking of a great magnitude. Geographical reasons aside, socioeconomic factors like poverty, illiteracy, and lack of employment opportunities, compound the problem further. Lack of awareness among the public also majorly hampers the efforts toward curbing human trafficking. Adults and children get trafficked on the pretext of jobs, marriage, education, and a better life.
The impact: Trafficking is a means to supply illegal human capital to sustain multiple criminal activities. These include bride trafficking, prostitution, child marriage, bonded labor, child soldiers, and organ harvesting. These crimes affect the nation by slowing human development and, eventually, the nation's growth. The only way to curb and eradicate these crimes is by stopping human trafficking, which acts as their supply chain.
The initiative: Rather than just rescuing and rehabilitating trafficking survivors, I am focused on preventing the incidence of trafficking itself. To that end, I organize initiatives to create awareness among the most vulnerable population through training and capacity-building sessions. At the same time, I am also reaching out to advocacy groups, educational institutions, and government bodies at district, block, and taluka levels to initiate conversations around this topic. The end goals will be empowering individuals and communities and ensuring they remain vigilant and not get trapped in this menace.
The process: Building awareness and initiating conversations are two main approaches I have adopted. To that end, I am conducting the following activities:



Awareness campaigns in villages through community outreach programmes like street plays
Organizing panchayats against human trafficking
Training and capacity-building workshops in educational institutions
Anti-trafficking clubs and village vigilante committees
Training members of local transport unions to identify and inform authorities about potential trafficking activities.


The challenges: My initiatives require extensive traveling, especially in remote areas of the state. However, the below-par means of transport and communication is the main obstacle to achieving the outreach targets. Apart from the road and rail infrastructure, the electrification and telecommunication facilities are also inadequate in these areas.

The needs: I need better means of transport and communication to reach out to more people.