Prison resources inadequate despite 24% jump in budget allocation in 5 yrs

India's expenditure on prison inmates has increased by 24.3 per cent in the past five years: from Rs 1,694.32 crore in 2017 to Rs 2,106.86 crore in 2021, according to the latest Prison Statistics in India report.

The states with the highest annual expenditure per inmate in 2021 were Andhra Pradesh (Rs 2.1 lakh), Haryana (Rs 1.4 lakh) and Delhi (Rs 1.1 lakh). However, prison occupancy, too, increased to 130 per cent in 2021 from 115.1 per cent in 2017.

"The overcrowding shouldn't have increased since these were the Covid-affected years," said Valay Singh, project lead on the India Justice Report, an independent collective of seven organisations that ranks Indian states based on their capacity to deliver justice. 

"The Supreme Court had asked the high courts and prison departments to release some prisoners to ensure decongestion during the pandemic. That hasn't happened. Overcrowding in jails would be much worse within the states. In individual jails, the overcrowding has touched 300 (per cent)," Singh added.

According to government data, occupancy in the district jails of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, is 411 per cent; in Jamui, Bihar, it is 447 per cent; and in Anuppur, Maharashtra, 310 per cent. 

A Business Standard analysis found that while the number of prisoners has increased by 23 per cent from 450,696 in 2017, the number of prisons has reduced by 3 per cent from 1,361 in the past five years. Undertrials made up a majority of prison inmates. As many as 77.1 per cent of the 554,034 inmates – roughly eight out of 10 – are awaiting a verdict in the trials pending against them. 

"Each inmate costs money. There are now three times the number of undertrials than there are convicts. This adds to huge overcrowding and all the consequent ills that flow from it,” said Maja Daruwala, convener and chief editor, India Justice Report. “The court, legal aid institutions and authorities are constantly concerned about reducing the numbers but decongestion measures that we saw during Covid are going to be of little use if prisons are quickly allowed to become overcrowded again, as has happened." 

Of the Rs 2,106.86 crore spent on inmates in 2021, Rs 1,624.4 crore was on undertrials alone. The government’s average expenditure per prisoner in five years was Rs 39,571.9 (Rs 108.4 per day), which is roughly one-third of India’s per capita income.

"This isn't enough. According to the FAO (State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report 2020), for any person to have adequate nutrition and diet in South Asia, a person needs $2.12 per day (roughly Rs 170/day)," Singh said. 

But, as Singh explained, it would be difficult to come up with national figures for a benchmark spending per prisoner as "the cost of living varies from state to state, from one city to another and from tier to tier". 

"The PSI (Prison Statistics Report) states that 54 per cent is spent on food and 5 per cent on medical matters. There is a lot of illness in prisons – sudden, serious ones and chronic infections of skin, stomach and bronchial illnesses. Plus, those brought about by the mental stress of being there,” said Daruwala. “To understand the adequacy of medical attention at 5 per cent expenditure, we need more granular data, prison by prison."

Further analysis of the report found that even though medical expenditures have increased by 54 per cent from 2017 to 2021, there is still a lack of medical personnel in prisons. The increase in budget has not necessarily meant an improvement in the availability of human resources. In 2021, 40 per cent of the 3,497 sanctioned posts for medical staff were lying vacant. The staff-to-prisoner availability has decreased from 4.4 medical staff for 1,000 prisoners in 2017 to 3.7 medical staff in 2021.

On the shortage of medical personnel in the prisons, Daruwala said, "The years of continuous medical officer shortages suggest that prisons must create their paramedics and barefoot doctors from amongst convicts.”