Precarity, Mobility, and the Law: Reframing Human Trafficking in India

Author: Rahman, K. C. Mujeebu

Abstract: This paper rethinks human trafficking in India not as an exceptional crime but as a manifestation of structural labor exploitation embedded within migration regimes. Dominant anti-trafficking frameworks in India, rooted in carceral and humanitarian logics, foreground rescue and prosecution while obscuring the agrarian decline, informalized labor relations, and gendered kinship dependencies that render certain populations vulnerable. Drawing on legal ethnography, the paper situates trafficking along a continuum of coercive work, where the boundaries between migration, exploitation, and trafficking remain fluid. By foregrounding India’s Jharkhand’s position as both a high out-migration and high source state, it demonstrates how mobility and coercion are co-produced through everyday practices of recruitment, debt, and survival. The analysis advances a labor-centered perspective that relocates the problem of trafficking from the domain of criminal law to the wider political economy of work, welfare, and inequality.

Keywords: human trafficking, labor migration, informal economy, India, law