The New Indian Express: Kochi: Monday, March 03, 2014.
Ever imagined
the daily running cost of prisons in state amounts to a whopping Rs 5 lakh! In
a curious piece of information, it has come to light that the state government
spends an average of Rs 18 crore annually to meet the food and related expenses
of prisoners and undertrials across the state. This includes the remuneration
given to prisoners for working in jails.
According to
details collected under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the state Exchequer
spends around Rs 1.5 crore monthly exclusively to meet various expenses of
prisoners, including food, and remuneration for their work.
The Borstal
School at Kakkanad, for juvenile delinquents, spends Rs 1.26 lakh a month for
feeding the inmates, and Rs 4,750 for the wages of prisioners.
The two
prisons for women, at Kannur and Attakulangara, together spend Rs 3 lakh for
prisoners’ food and other daily expenses while the amount given for
remuneration here is only Rs 25,000.
“Interestingly,
at the two open jails at Nettukalthery and Cheemeni the money spent on
prisoners’ wages is much higher compared to their daily expenses.
At
Nettukalthery the feeding expenses come to Rs 4.58 lakh while the wages given
to the inmates is around Rs 6.27 lakh. Similarly at Cheemeni, feeding expenses
is Rs 4.57 lakh while the wages here come to around Rs 6.50 lakh,” pointed out
M K Haridas of The Proper Channel who collected the information under RTI. In a
previous RTI filed a couple of years ago, it was revealed that the Kerala
prisons were crammed.
“It revealed
that most of the prisons are overcrowded, particularly the Central prisons in
Thiruvananthapuram and Viyyur - both had double the number of prisoners. With
the expenses for running the jails coming out it’s high time the government
came up with effective measures to run them,” Haridas suggested. The data was
collected from 48 jails, including the Borstal Jail at Kakkanad, women jails in
Kannur and Attakkulangara, open prisons at Nettukalthery and Cheemeni, three
Central jails of Kannur, Poojappura and Viyyur, 9 district jails, 15 sub-jails
and 16 special sub-jails.
The district
jails together spend Rs 23.84 lakhs a month for food-related expenses of
prisoners, while the remuneration expenses comes to the tune of Rs 91,770.
The 15
sub-jails in the state spend a total of Rs 30.12 lakh for prison food while the
wages for those lodged at these jails will come to around Rs 32,280 only. The
reason could be that the sub-jails house mostly undertrials. Surprisingly, a
collective information on the expenses for prisoners was not available with the
office of the Jail DGP. The government has to spend around Rs 1,000 just to
reply to an RTI query.
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