BS READS: Are corporate-run prisons an answer to India's rotting jails?

By allowing corporate entities to manage separate jails for undertrials, state governments could free up to 70 per cent capacity in India's notoriously overcrowded prisons

Between March 21 and 23, the Dum Dum jail in West Bengal, one of the 144 central jails in the country, saw India’s worst prison violence in recent times. Hundreds of the 3,900-odd inmates believed to be lodged in this high-security prison, grabbed cooking gas cylinders and triggered explosions. Improvised guns were fired on prison personnel, and jail inmates and staff were slashed with knives.

The trigger for the violence, it was reported, were restrictions on movement imposed in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. These were enough to set the Dum Dum jail, surrounded by residential areas, on fire.