Undertrials up from 69 to 76%, prisoners’ access to courts, hospitals fell 65%, 24%

By Jag Jivan
Access of prisoners to courts fell by 65%, and to hospitals by 24%, according to the Prison Statistics India (PSI) 2020, the latest official statistics on the state of India’s prisons and their inmates, published in December 2021, an analysis of the PSI data by The India Justice Report (IJR), released recently, has said.
Brought out by a collective of organisations -- Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, DAKSH, TISS–Prayas, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and How India Lives, and supported by Tata Trusts, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and the Tree of Life Foundation, IJR, which, since 2019, has been reporting on justice delivery in India, said, prisoners’ visits to courts came down nearly a third, from about 44.5 lakhs in 2019 to 15.5 lakhs in 2020.
Impacted too was inmates’ access to health services, with the number of visits, made by prisoners for medical attendance, declining from 4.77 lakh in 2019 to 3.63 lakh visits in 2020, said the report, adding, visits by medical personnel to prisons also reduced from 24,524 in 2019 to 20,871 in 2020, while visits by judicial officers nearly halved to 9,257 in 2020 from 16,178 in 2019.
Maja Daruwala, Chief Editor, IJR, said, “The status of essential capacities decides the efficacy of the pillars of the justice system to deliver to the standards they have set for themselves.” She added, “The PSI 2020 presents a grim picture of the state of prisons through the pandemic. Despite the many efforts to decongest these institutions, and minimise the risks of contagion inherent in these overcrowded places, their overall condition has not improved.”

Overcrowding

About 9 lakh more arrests were made in 2020, and, taken at December 2020 in terms of absolute numbers, the prison population grew 1.5% from 481,387 to 488,511 inmates, the report said, adding, the annual increase is particularly worrying; given that 2020 was a Covid year when a slew of decongestion efforts were being implemented across the nation. However, the total number of people entering and leaving prisons in the course of the year fell from 19.02 lakhs in 2019 to 16.31 lakh in 2020.

The report said, as of December 2020, nationally, overcrowding stood at 18%, a marginal reduction of 2 percentage points from the previous year. This figure is the national average across 1,306 prisons. In nine (Jharkhand, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh) states overcrowding rates are more than the national average.
Much of this overcrowding is accounted for by the presence of ‘undertrials’, it said. Their share has increased from 69% in December 2019 to 76% in December 2020; showing that for every 1 convicted prisoner, there are 3 people in custody awaiting ‘investigation, inquiry or trial’.
According to the report, this follows a long-term trend. Five years ago, in 2016, undertrials accounted for 68% of the prison population. As with all preceding years, a majority of prisoners come from amongst the poor and illiterate. Besides chronic overcrowding, other long term comorbidities in the prison system have persisted and indeed worsened.

1 in 3 staff positions vacant

The report noted, across the country and despite this period traversing a pandemic, the shortage of medical officers and staff continues; and, in some states, their numbers have, in fact, gone down. Nationally, vacancies among medical staff and officers stand at about 33%, which means 1 in every 3 posts has not been filled.
There were 797 medical officers in the country’s prisons to serve nearly 489,000 inmates, it said. On average, this means each medical officer was looking after 613 inmates. However, the Model Prison Manual 2016 requires there to be 1 medical officer for every 300 inmates.
The sanctioned strength in 17 states (Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland) does not meet this criterion. Only 9 states (Bihar, Uttarakhand, Tripura, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, Haryana) have managed to reduce their medical officer vacancies.
Then, it said, from January to December 2020, total deaths went from 1764 in the previous year to 1887. The deaths remain categorised as ‘natural’ ‘unnatural’ and ‘cause not known’, and deaths related to Covid have not been disaggregated.

Video-conferencing facilities

The average number of prisons equipped with a video conferencing facility rose from 60% in 2019 to 69% in 2020. Thirteen states/UTs (Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Assam, Puducherry, Ladakh, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, DnH & Daman Diu, Uttarakhand, Goa) had 100% coverage across their prisons.
In contrast, 6 states/UTs (Tamil Nadu, A&N Islands, Nagaland, West Bengal, Manipur, Rajasthan) had less than half of their prisons equipped with this facility. Tamil Nadu, with 142 prisons, had only 10% or 14 jails with a V-C facility. None of Lakshadweep’s 4 prisons had this facility available.

Comments

Plastic burning in homes threatens food, water and air across Global South: Study

By Jag Jivan In a groundbreaking study spanning 26 countries across the Global South , researchers have uncovered the widespread and concerning practice of households burning plastic waste as a fuel for cooking, heating, and other domestic needs. The research, published in Nature Communications , reveals that this hazardous method of managing both waste and energy poverty is driven by systemic failures in municipal services and the unaffordability of clean alternatives, posing severe risks to human health and the environment.

Economic superpower’s social failure? Inequality, malnutrition and crisis of India's democracy

By Vikas Meshram India may be celebrated as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, but a closer look at who benefits from that growth tells a starkly different story. The recently released World Inequality Report 2026 lays bare a country sharply divided by wealth, privilege and power. According to the report, nearly 65 percent of India’s total wealth is owned by the richest 10 percent of its population, while the bottom half of the country controls barely 6.4 percent. The top one percent—around 14 million people—holds more than 40 percent, the highest concentration since 1961. Meanwhile, the female labour force participation rate is a dismal 15.7 percent.

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

From colonial mercantilism to Hindutva: New book on the making of power in Gujarat

By Rajiv Shah Professor Ghanshyam Shah ’s latest book, “ Caste-Class Hegemony and State Power: A Study of Gujarat Politics ”, published by Routledge , is penned by one of Gujarat ’s most respected chroniclers, drawing on decades of fieldwork in the state. It seeks to dissect how caste and class factors overlap to perpetuate the hegemony of upper strata in an ostensibly democratic polity. The book probes the dominance of two main political parties in Gujarat—the Indian National Congress and the BJP—arguing that both have sustained capitalist growth while reinforcing Brahmanic hierarchies.

History, culture and literature of Fatehpur, UP, from where Maulana Hasrat Mohani hailed

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* Maulana Hasrat Mohani was a member of the Constituent Assembly and an extremely important leader of our freedom movement. Born in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, Hasrat Mohani's relationship with nearby district of Fatehpur is interesting and not explored much by biographers and historians. Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri has written a book on Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Fatehpur. The book is in Urdu. He has just come out with another important book, 'Hindi kee Pratham Rachna: Chandayan' authored by Mulla Daud Dalmai.' During my recent visit to Fatehpur town, I had an opportunity to meet Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri and recorded a conversation with him on issues of history, culture and literature of Fatehpur. Sharing this conversation here with you. Kindly click this link. --- *Human rights defender. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat , X @freetohumanity, Skype @vbrawat

The greatest threat to our food system: The aggressive push for GM crops

By Bharat Dogra Thanks to the courageous resistance of several leading scientists who continue to speak the truth despite increasing pressures from the powerful GM crop and GM food lobby , the many-sided and in some contexts irreversible environmental and health impacts of GM foods and crops, as well as the highly disruptive effects of this technology on farmers, are widely known today.

UP tribal woman human rights defender Sokalo released on bail

By A Representative After almost five months in jail, Adivasi human rights defender and forest worker Sokalo Gond has been finally released on bail.Despite being granted bail on October 4, technical and procedural issues kept Sokalo behind bars until November 1. The Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) and the All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP), which are backing Sokalo, called it a "major victory." Sokalo's release follows the earlier releases of Kismatiya and Sukhdev Gond in September. "All three forest workers and human rights defenders were illegally incarcerated under false charges, in what is the State's way of punishing those who are active in their fight for the proper implementation of the Forest Rights Act (2006)", said a CJP statement.

Would breaking idols, burning books annihilate caste? Recalling a 1972 Dalit protest

By Rajiv Shah A few days ago, I received an email alert from a veteran human rights leader who has fought many battles in Gujarat for the Dalit cause — both through ground-level campaigns and courtroom struggles. The alert, sent in Gujarati by Valjibhai Patel, who heads the Council for Social Justice, stated: “In 1935, Babasaheb Ambedkar burnt the Manusmriti . In 1972, we broke the idol of Krishna , whom we regarded as the creator of the varna (caste) system.”

May the Earth Be Auspicious: Vedic ecology and contemporary crisis in Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry

By Ravi Ranjan* Ashok Vajpeyi, born in 1941, occupies a singular position in contemporary Hindi poetry as a poet whose work quietly but decisively reorients modern literary consciousness toward ethical, ecological, and civilizational questions. Across more than six decades of writing, Vajpeyi has forged a poetic idiom marked by restraint, philosophical attentiveness, and moral seriousness, resisting both rhetorical excess and ideological simplification.

Search This Blog