News18: New Delhi: Wednesday, August 02, 2017.
India has one
of the highest undertrial populations behind the bars, with 67.2% of prisoners
being undertrials and not convicts, a report by Amnesty International revealed.
A large
number of them don't have a proper access to legal aid, and at least a quarter
of inmates have been languishing in jails for more than a year across the
country.
According to
the Amnesty International report published last week lack of legal aid and
non-availability of security forces to escort these inmates to and from the
court were cited as primary reasons for such a large number of prisoners.
Amnesty studied
the condition of prisoners in jails and collated data under the RTI from prison
authorities governing 154 jails in 18 States.
“There are
twice as many undertrials in Indian jails, as there are convicts,” says Leah
Verghese, a researcher at Amnesty, in her report that was released last week.
Contrast this with the US where only 20 per cent of the jail inmates are
undertrials and you have a skewed criminal justice system that doesn’t bow to
the 'bail-is-the-norm' concept.
RTI data
shows that there were a staggering 82,334 instances when undertrials could not
be taken to the court purely because of the shortage of police escorts between
September 2014 and February 2015. Though video-conferencing is available, there
were 27,694 cases in which undertrials could not be produced before a judge
through this, either.
Most Indian
prisons are also crowded beyond humane-ness with States like Chhattisgarh
filled to a suffocating 233 per cent capacity. There are more than two lakh undertrials
across the country making India the third highest in Asia in terms of
undertrial population and most jails are overflowing. At least 15 States have
prisons that have more than a 100-per-cent occupancy rate this includes the
capital, Delhi, with a whopping 226 per cent occupancy rate.
The data
raises serious questions on prison administration, coming as it does in the
wake of exposes in Karnataka’s jails over easy access to drugs, ill-treatment
of jail inmates, overcrowding and special treatment to certain high-profile
convicts.
At least 53
per cent of undertrials waiting for justice are from minorities, Dalits or
tribals again, a disproportionate number, the report states, as these
communities make up only 39 per cent of the country’s population.
Legal aid is
not easily available as lawyers enlisted by the State for this are paid poorly:
one lawyer in Bihar reported he was paid a measly Rs 500 for a case that went
on for three years.
Amnesty has
also recommended to the government and government agencies to streamline
reforms so that monitoring and coordination are better, and maintain a
computerised database of all inmates that can give alerts about pending
releases and other actions.