It was a jet black Jaguar one week, a Mercedes the next; sometimes, a drive within the city or a cross-country trip to Goa. Surender Singh was 27, working for a private cab service, doing what he loved — driving. His days were spent ferrying magistrates and lawyers around the city but the nights he reserved for his friends.
“We were a large group of friends who were into bikes and cars. Some of them were dancers. And at night, I would use my friends’ bikes for stunts. They would bet on me,” he says. Born into a cross-cultural home — with a father from Delhi and mother from Tamil Nadu — Singh had just got married and had his first child. “I stopped the stunts after a few accidents. I just kept my head down and got more driving work and soon I started driving people across the country,” he continues. “I also liked to sing, and had started scoring gigs at local pubs or neighbourhood functions. Beyond that, the memory fades a little. It was 10 years ago.”
Singh is sitting at a cafe in West Delhi, a month after being released from jail on permanent bail. He is wearing a crisp white shirt, tucked into a pair of jeans, and is sporting a black cap. He takes a deep breath, as if in preparation to talk about the worst decade of his life — the time he spent inside Tihar Jail on murder charges in a road rage case.
“The first two months, I was asked to sweep the prayer field, clean the toilets, mop the floor, and so on. It took me a while to find the rhythm of the prison,” says Singh, explaining how he worked through the various departments at Tihar Jail No.1. “It did not really seem like work until I started needing the money to send back home.” That’s when Singh realised that as an undertrial, he had to write to the prison authorities asking to be put on the payroll. “I submitted the papers, and earned a little over ₹2,000 the first time. It took a while for the money to start coming in, however. The first few years, the wages would be staggered and we would get the accumulated amount only every other month,” he recalls, his smile fading away.
India’s roughly 1,400 prisons house 5.73 lakh inmates (as of 2022), over 75% of whom are undertrials. All of them have, at some point during their time inside, worked in one capacity or the other, irrespective of whether or not they were paid for it. This is despite the landmark Supreme Court judgment from 1998 that states no inmate can be put to work without pay.
In addition, the Model Prison Manual, 2003, which is the guiding principle for prison management in India, stipulates that “the salaries given to workers should not be minimal or trifling, but rather fair and equitable. These rates, which must be paid to employees, must be standardised and frequently changed in compliance with government notices clarifying/ changing the appropriate minimum wages”. And, it is up to the individual State governments to fix minimum wages for prison inmates based on their broad classification as skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled workers.
As of 2022, in at least 14 States and Union Territories, the minimum prison wage for skilled work is set at less than ₹100 per day. Thus, a convict in Maharashtra, Goa, Haryana or Assam earns just about ₹70 (average) a day for skilled work, while his counterpart in Delhi’s Tihar Jail makes between ₹194 (unskilled) and ₹308 (skilled). For comparison, the regular minimum wages in the Capital are ₹495 and ₹600, respectively; it is ₹307 and ₹417 in Goa; and ₹292 and ₹338 in Haryana.
Rehab and skilling
The idea of prison as a place for correction and improvement has its roots in the early 20th century global human rights movement, and paid work is possibly the most important part of jail reform and rehabilitation. Not only do wages accord dignity to prisoners’ labour, they also incentivise good behaviour and productivity besides fostering emotional well-being.
Prison labour also helps these institutions reduce their daily operating costs besides equipping those incarcerated with skills or training for gainful employment upon release.
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, candle-making units, garment factories, and so on. Some like the Meerut District Jail have a unit that produces cricket kits, while prisons in Maharashtra and Kerala have inmates operating bakeries and eateries. In Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, inmates run petrol pumps. In 2022, prisons all over India sold products worth ₹267.03 crore.
Says Balram Kumar Upadhyay, Director General of Prisons & Correctional Services in Kerala, “We are in the process of synchronising the work of prisoners and vocational courses in tune with the requirements of the local economy. Inmates are also made aware of the assistance they can get from the social justice department to set up small-scale entrepreneurship on their release.”
However, it is in the physical day-to-day 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 Bhima-Koregaon 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 67-year-old.
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.
The arbitrary categorisation of work as skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled is another point of contention. “Imagine this, for three to four months, I was the librarian at Tihar jail. I had to open the library, bring the books, categorise them, do the lending, and maintain the space. I also managed to write and send requests for books, newspapers, magazines and other reading materials for inmates to use. And this work was categorised only as semi-skilled,” says Natasha Narwal, a student activist who was jailed for 13 months under UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967), in a case related to the anti-CAA protests in New Delhi.
Says Thangavelu, “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.”
Prisoners also bemoan the fact that a sizeable portion of their wages goes towards deduction under various heads. “Earlier, 70% of my salary used to be deducted. Towards the end, only 20% was deducted. We would take ₹4,000 or ₹5,000 when we went home on parole. Despite the meagre sum, it was a solace for our family members.” As per the 1998 judgment, a part of prisoners’ wages must be deducted towards two heads: one, towards a victims’ compensation fund and the other towards the maintenance and upkeep of the jail and amenities used by the inmates. “In essence, this second component is asking the inmates to pay for their own incarceration,” says Narwal.
According to a senior officer of the Prison and Correctional Services in Tamil Nadu, 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 Director-General 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 ex-convicts 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 Narwal. “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 life-convict-turned-writer 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 could not have asked for a better opportunity.”
Rao, a freelance recording artist, who has worked with Akashwani Bhawan, FM stations and recorded music, had the idea of working with prison inmates of Delhi and set up the Lakshay Foundation in 2011. “We started the first radio station in jail that year itself,” Rao says, adding the response was not what he expected at all. “You see, in prison, there is not much entertainment. The few inmates who had the chance to provide it were treated like gods. They were in charge of playing music through the PA system, taking requests, and performing on special occasions, so there was a lot of interest in the programme,” he says, adding that he admitted only talented inmates.
“Not everyone inside the jail will be able to pick up things like music — careers where a criminal past might not necessarily be a deterrent. And even in my class, it is not possible that all inmates will be able to learn and use their talents outside,” says Rao, adding that he continues to help his students once they are released.
“The moment I was accepted to Rao’s class, I knew this was my place,” Singh says, beaming. “I used to just sing before but I learned to play the guitar and the keyboard at these classes.”
Singh is now looking to rebuild his life — this time with a career in music, “mostly for my family, my wife and daughter, and my mother”. As part of Rao’s group, he was among the first batch of prison inmates to score a show at the India Habitat Centre two years ago. “All I can say is that I got lucky finding the people I did when I did. I can only hope others on the inside have the same luck.”
For Madhavan (name changed) too, his time inside the district jail in Kerala’s Ernakulam district — where he was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for murder nearly two decades ago — was not completely in vain. He found respite in farming after he was assigned the job, and now following his release from jail, makes a living doing the same.
“Though the prison department has no system for following up on prisoners on their release, I went looking for him. He now runs a vegetable farm on a leased land at Kolancherry (along the eastern suburbs of Ernakulam). There are many such ex-prisoners who have found a decent living inspired by prison labour,” says O.J. Thomas, Welfare Officer at Ernakulam District Jail.
abhinay.lakshman@thehindu.co.in
With inputs from Mayank Kumar (U.P.), Amarnath Tewary (Bihar), M.P. Praveen (Kochi), Purnima Sah (Mumbai), R. Sivaraman (Tamil Nadu), Naveen Kumar (Telangana) and Samridhi Tewari (New Delhi).
