BEHIND BARS
Retired IPS officer Kiran Bedi, who won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1994 for her reform measures at Tihar Jail, says that prisoners with professional skills, whether undertrials or convicted, must be identified to train others. “We can build on time in hand with prisoners, and create an ecosystem wherein prisons can become rehab and skilling centres. When a prisoner enters the system, a work profile with details of his education and employment must be created and shared across jails. His skills must be marketed so work orders can be accepted from anywhere,” she says, adding that such systems may already exist in some jails in the country.
Most prisons have manufacturing units for daily grocery items such as oils and spices, workshops for woodwork, metalwork, candlemaking units, garment factories, and so on. Some like the Meerut District Jail have a unit that produces cricket kits, while prisons in Maharashtra have inmates operating bakeries. In Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, inmates run petrol pumps. In 2022, prisons all over India sold products worth ₹267.03 crore.
However, it is in the physical daytoday running of the prisons themselves that most inmates are engaged in — from cooking and cleaning to managing wage rosters, phone booths, volunteering for legal aid, and running libraries.
Lawyer and activist Sudha Bharadwaj, who spent three years behind bars in Pune’s Yerwada Jail and Mumbai’s Byculla Jail after her arrest in the BhimaKoregaon case, speaks highly of the women convicts at Yerwada whose daily toil keeps the jail machinery running. “These women grow the rice, green leafy vegetables, onions and radishes that are a wholesome part of our diet in jail. There is also factory work, sewing, weaving and some auto spare parts jobs. The most unskilled is the rolling of agarbattis, again earning paltry wages. What the women earn allows them to buy some items such as soaps, shampoo, nappies for their babies, notebooks, etc.,” she says, adding, “But work is also important to fill up time, to maintain sanity, to feel worthwhile and useful.”
Choice to work
Most prisons across the country largely put only convicts to work compulsorily — about 25% of the prison population — as part of their sentence. The undertrials are given the option to either work (without pay) or go for vocational training. For instance, in Bihar, only the convicts are entitled to wages in exchange for the work they do. Undertrials may choose to work but this will only be counted towards “good behaviour” and will not get them any wages. But, in Uttar Pradesh, both convicts and undertrials are paid for their work. In
Telangana too, both are entitled to equal wages but undertrials have a choice of whether they want to work or not, just like in Delhi’s Tihar.
According to G. Thangavelu, a former life convict recently released from the Central Jail in Salem, Tamil Nadu, “Prisoners get work at the whims and fancies of jail officials. Also, we are paid poorly and not as per the Minimum Wages Act. In 1990, after conviction, I was assigned to work at a boot workshop in Vellore Central Prison though I was not skilled at the job. I got 50 paise as wages per day. In 1992, the government hiked it to ₹2 but there was a delay in payment. We went on a strike demanding our wages and all of those who agitated were shifted to different prisons in the State,” says the 67yearold.
Currently, convicts engaged in prison industries in Tamil Nadu are paid between ₹160 and ₹200 per day. The wages are modified by a Wage Fixation Committee every five years.
“I had to struggle a lot to mark myself as a skilled labourer. I worked at a clothes store for the last six years before joining the laundry service, which was newly introduced,” says Thangavelu. “Earlier, 70% of my salary was deducted towards different heads. Towards the end, only 20% was deducted. We would carry ₹4,000 or ₹5,000 when we went home on parole. Despite the meagre sum, it was a solace for our family members.”
A senior officer of the Prison and Correctional Services in Tamil Nadu says the percentage of deduction from convicts’ wages is very low now when compared to previous years. “The wages are increased by the State government from time to time. The prisoner can choose to pocket his earnings or have it sent home. They are also permitted to use the money for purchase of articles of personal use from the prison canteen,” he says.
In Delhi, Tihar’s DirectorGeneral
◣
(Clockwise from above) Prisoners operating a fuel bunk in Andhra Pradesh; a stitching unit inside Tihar Jail; and farming in Coimbatore Central Prison.
Sanjay Baniwal says there have been rapid improvements in the Capital’s prisons as well. He says that the 16 jails of Tihar now have 34 working units that train and employ inmates. “We’re reinventing ourselves to suit the modern market. The inmates are efficient in creating good quality products for both commercial and personal use. The task right now is to approach retailers and online markets to scale up our business,” he says, adding that most orders they get are from the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court for stationery items.
Yet, according to data, in Delhi where undertrials outnumber convicts 10:1 in a prison population of over 19,000 inmates, only 3,174 undertook vocational training in 2022. Senior prison administrators in Bihar, Telangana, Delhi and Tamil Nadu who spoke to The Hindu insist that they maintain the highest possible standards of working conditions within the prisons in an effort to turn punitive labour into rehabilitative labour. But rehabilitative to what extent, ask exconvicts and former inmates, who allege that the labour is far from useful for employment after their jail term. Also, the working conditions within continue to be punishing in nature.
“So much of the work that the inmates do is under some form of duress. When we first walk in, the cleaning work begins, and after that, almost everything that you are assigned is dependent on how the people in power perceive you,” says Natasha Narwal, a student activist who was jailed for 13 months in Tihar under UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967), in a case related to the antiCAA protests in New Delhi.
“Most days, we would work for six to seven hours but only four hours would be clocked. The jail officials would decide that a particular task takes x number of hours and the inmate will get paid only for those hours, regardless of how much time the task actually takes. And they would assign cleaning duty on Sundays, so they could say it is a holiday and not have it count towards paid hours.”
According to Thiyagu, a former lifeconvictturnedwriter and social activist, and coordinator of the Joint Action Committee Against Custodial Torture, “The labour assigned to a prisoner is not useful for him after his release. The government should have a plan for rehabilitation and employment of released prisoners. In the absence of such a plan, will any private entity give him a job? The government should set an example by giving employment to such persons.”
Second innings
Santosh Rao is not a very large man. Dressed in blue jeans and a black jacket, he might be just another face in the crowd at West Delhi’s Pacific Mall but a few kilometres away, inside the jails of Tihar, his voice is legendary and unmistakable.
“I came to know about Rao after I first heard his voice on the PA system inside my jail,” says Singh. “This man had started a radio station inside the jail and was running music classes, accepting inmates into his cohort. I remember thinking to myself that I