Eastern Mirror: Lucknow: Sunday, June 04, 2017.
Uttar Pradesh
prisons are massively overcrowded, holding 60 per cent more than the
permissible capacity of inmates, an RTI response has revealed.
In a reply to
an Right to Information (RTI) application filed by social activist, Nutan
Thakur, prison officials have informed that there were around 93,301 persons in
Uttar Pradesh jails, while the official capacity is 58,111 persons.
Overcrowding
is a major problem in Indian jails with the Supreme Court last year terming the
situation “not only tragic but also pathetic”.
As per the
information dated May 30, 2017, given by Akhtar Riaz, Additional IG
(Administration) Jails, there are a total of 70 jails in Uttar Pradesh of which
five are central jails at Naini (Allahabad), Varanasi, Fatehabad, Bareilly and
Agra, and three are special jails at Lucknow and Bareilly.
These jails
can accomodate 58,111 persons, which includes capacity for 51,839 men, 2,956
women and 3,316 juvenile prisoners.
But on April
30, 2017, all these jails combined had 25,975 men, 1,079 women, 83 juvenile and
137 foreign convict prisoners, along with 33 boys and 34 girls living with
female convicts, taking the number to 27,274 convict prisoners and 67 children.
There were
also 59,507 men, 2,706 women, 3,001 juvenile, 227 foreigner and 115 other
undertrials, along with 239 boys and 165 girls with women undertrials, taking
the total number of undertrial prisoners to 65,556 along with 404 children.
Thus, the
total number of persons in the state’s jails stands at 93,301 with 11,470 in
the central jails and 699 are in special jails. This includes 364 foreign
prisoners as well.
The number of
undertrials is almost 2.4 times the number of convicts.
Talking to
IANS, Nutan Thakur said: “The overcrowding of the state prisons along with
presence of such large number of undertrials is indeed a worrying situation
that needs to be sorted out without delay.”
Since the
past few years, Uttar Pradesh prisons have become war zones with many riots and
incidents of violence reported.