The Keralam government has proposed that a standard operating procedure (SOP) on missing children/child or human trafficking should contain a prevention component covering identification of vulnerable families and children, community-level emotional and social support, frontline (teacher/anganwadi) sensitisation, awareness education, and counselled repatriation.

Enforcement alone will not be enough since emotional, social and economic vacuum around the child drives most disappearances.

It has also stressed that the form of prevention should be left to each State to develop according to its local conditions since what suits Keralam’s near-universal institutional systems may not suit another State.

The proposals were made by the State’s Women and Child Development (WCD) department at a zonal consultation for southern States convened by a committee constituted by the Supreme Court in the wake of directives passed by the court in a case.

Protocols

The WCD department has mooted that the SOP expressly recognise the purposes for which persons are trafficked so that investigation, rescue, and rehabilitation protocols are attached to each—trafficking of infants at birth (for illegal adoption); sexual exploitation of children and women; domestic servitude of children and women; forced and cheap labour, including of women; organ removal; and begging.

For each of these purposes, enforcement should proceed on the “full chain”—backward to the recruiter, transporter and source, and forward to the placement agency, employer, brothel, institution or buyer at the destination—rather than terminating at the rescue of the victim.

Awareness creation—in schools, in source communities, among migrant families and at transit points such as railway stations—and victim-centred rehabilitation can be built into the SOP.

Systems such as traceability, demand-side liability and reunification infrastructure should be built before the infant trafficking market entrenches itself, not after.

National framework

A uniform national framework may be considered for anonymous pregnancy care centres attached to government hospitals or women welfare institutions.

A mother-linked record of every institutional live birth within one hour of delivery should be operationalised and every stillbirth or neonatal death should be certified by a second doctor uninvolved in the delivery and auto-flagged for audit.

Reconciliation of every newborn exit from private hospitals and nursing homes against a registered birth, time-bound declaration of abandoned and surrendered children as legally free for adoption within the statutorily prescribed periods, and prosecution of every intermediary and the buyer have also been suggested.

Other suggestions

Some of the other suggestions include declaring domestic work an organised sector with a proper system of registration of workers and employers through the local bodies; registration of every adolescent worker with verified identity, recorded employer and recorded wages to prevent fraudulent agencies from faking identity proof and placing children beyond the reach of government recourse; and mandatory registration and monitoring of every placement agency and recruitment consultant, with verifiable records of every person placed.

Operation of unregistered agencies should be investigated as a trafficking offence. All unregistered and illegal agencies should be shut down, with their properties taken over and applied as compensation to the persons cheated by them.