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Imagine being a person merely accused of a crime – presumably innocent – stuck in an overcrowded prison in the middle of a raging pandemic.
This was the reality of more than 3.7 lakh people in India. With the on-set of a global pandemic, when one would expect public health reasons to accelerate justice needs and release anyone who should not be in prison, we instead saw the sharpest increase in over 2 decades – the undertrial population rose by 11.7 percent in 2020, according to the latest statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau.
Undertrials therefore now comprise nearly 76 percent of prison inmates in 2020, up from 69 percent the year before.