In 2006, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in South Asia, in partnership with the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, initiated Project IND/S16. In the beginning, five states were selected to train police officials under the “Strengthening the Law Enforcement Response to Human Trafficking” project. The training program resulted from a study done by two researchers, Dr. P. M. Nair and Shanker Seen. Their study recommended training programs to strengthen the law enforcement response to human trafficking and establish anti-human trafficking units (AHTUs) in India. However, no evaluation of the work of functionaries of AHTUs was done until the authors of this article took the initiative with the support of the Additional Director General of Police of Gujarat to identify the major problems in AHTUs at the grassroots level. Their exploratory research covered the 40 AHTUs from all 33 districts of Gujarat, focusing on the experiences and opinions of 214 police authorities (i.e. police inspectors, police sub-inspectors, assistant sub-inspectors, constables, and Lok Rakshak (public guards)) officially assigned to the AHTUs of Gujarat. This article summarizes the research and is based on experiences documented while collecting information in the field.

This policy analysis reviews three popular proposals with significant political endorsement to enhance long-term care (LTC), here defined broadly to include residential care facilities, home care, and community care, in the wake of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis: national standards, provincial autonomy, and de-privatization. The proposals are summarized succinctly followed by a neo-institutionalist analysis of the obstacles to enact them based upon a series of interviews conducted prior to COVID-19 with senior civil servants in Canadian provinces for a newly published book (Marier, 2021) and political considerations. While the federal government has pursued the avenue of instituting national standards, the provinces have clearly expressed a desire to secure higher federal health transfers and pursue LTC reforms on their own. Considering the diversity of LTC arrangements across the provinces, which impact the politics of LTC within each jurisdiction, and the presence of many Conservative governments in provincial capitals, Ottawa faces an uphill battle to transform profoundly the LTC landscape.