Four undertrials missing for a year

Times of India: Bangalore: Tuesday, 22 July 2014.

While scouting for undertrial prisoners (UTPs) who may be eligible for release under section 436A of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), RTI activists unearthed a huge deficit of information with the prisons department. They found four UTPs missing for a year and case details ambiguous.

Section 436A states that any UTP who has been in jail for more than half of the maximum punishment for the crime he is charged with, should be released on personal bond without bail.

According to a mid-2103 reply from Bangalore Central Jail to activists, four UTPs were eligible for release by 2014. When Divya Iyer of Amnesty International, India, who had received this letter, visited the prison to meet these people, they were found to be missing.

"Repeated announcements summoning the UTPs resulted in nobody turning up," Nusrat Khan, who is also working on Amnesty's campaign 'Justice for Undertrials', told TOI. "We went there on 10 days and the same thing repeated. While the records at the prison said they were in jail, officials just could not find them," she added.

Divya wrote to the prisons department and the DIG of Prisons in Bangalore seeking information on the prisoners. The DIG, Prisons, Bangalore Central Jail, replied that two of them were handed over to Kerala police while the other two, both accused in the same case, were handed over to Upparpet police in Bangalore.

However, there is no information on what happened to them since. "What was alarming was that files in the prison said they were still in jail. Not maintaining information or not upgrading it results in denying several rights to the UTPs," Durga Nandini of Amnesty said.

Further, a series of RTIs seeking details of those eligible under section 436A, filed with prisons in all 30 districts of the state, throw more light on lack of information.

"Of the 30 applications, only 16 districts replied to our queries, with 46% not even bothering to reply. And of those who replied, everyone said there are no eligible UTPs, which comes as a shock given the pending cases in the state. Only one district (Mysore) replied in the positive," she said.