New Delhi: After a “detailed and nuanced” analysis of the 70-year-old Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA), the Supreme Court has ruled that the main objective of the law is neither to eliminate prostitution nor to make it a criminal offence, but to prevent its commercialization.A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan said, “We are convinced that the main objective of the Act is not to eliminate prostitution or to make prostitution a criminal offence. Rather, its objective is to prevent or eliminate commercialization of prostitution, that is, prostitution as an organized means of earning a living.”While dealing with the issue of rehabilitation of women rescued from brothels, the bench analyzed the 1956 Act and said that in the early 20th century, trafficking of women for prostitution was common and considered “immoral”, hence the term got attached to the law.The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) was brought in primarily to punish criminals and not to punish prostitutes,” the Supreme Court said.Writing the 298-page judgment, Justice Pardiwala said Sections 7 and 8 of the Act, which provide for punishing individual acts of prostitution in specific circumstances such as “open prostitution”, are exceptions to this general rule. Section 7 punishes any person engaged in prostitution near public places, and Section 8 criminalizes soliciting clients in public places.The bench said, “The view is that although individual acts of prostitution do not directly demand abandonment, yet public decency and social morality require that even visible initiatives for such solitary, non-commercial forms of prostitution in the vicinity of public institutions and other notified areas be prevented in order to prevent public nuisance.” Wasn’t trying to make a case for de-regulation. Business. What we are trying to convey is that while making it clear that the legislative intent is not to condemn all acts of prostitution, the definition retains some regulatory ambiguity by characterizing it solely as abusive or exploitative.On examination of the definition of the word ‘brothel’ in Section 2 of the Act, the bench said, “It must be made clear that where a single woman carries on prostitution for her livelihood, without any other prostitute, or without involving any other person in the maintenance of such premises, her residence will not be a ‘brothel’.”