Maharashtra shuts all 116 sub-jails, ends colonial-era prison system

The GR issued by the Revenue and Forest Department states that senior officials from the Revenue and Home departments met in January and the committee recommended shutting them down and, wherever necessary, allowing the prison department to seek land and infrastructure to upgrade facilities into district prisons. The government has directed authorities to formally close the sub-jails and repeal the separate jail manual under which they functioned.

According to records from the Prison Statistics of India, Maharashtra had the highest number of sub-jails in the country in the early 2000s, with 172 such facilities. Over the years, many were gradually shut down.

The sub-jails operated under a separate Sub-Jail Manual first drafted in 1928 and amended in 1952. Dating back to the British era, these facilities were located in mahals or talukas and were meant to house prisoners sentenced to imprisonment of up to 14 days as well as inmates in transit to district or central prisons.

Unlike regular prisons, these facilities were administered by the revenue department. Clerks functioned as jailors, while the tehsildar served as superintendent and reported to the Inspector General of Prisons. Maharashtra and Karnataka remained among the few states where such sub-jails continued to function under the revenue department instead of the prison administration.

Over time, the facilities increasingly came to be used to temporarily house prisoners when district or central prisons were located far away and police were unable to immediately transfer inmates after courts remanded them to judicial custody. In 2010, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) released a report titled Maharashtra’s Abandoned Prisons, describing the facilities as a “gross violation of fundamental rights”. The report documented poor living conditions, with several sub-jails functioning out of dilapidated revenue department buildings lacking basic amenities.

“The prison department does not provide funds for maintaining these prisons, and the revenue department does not seem to consider this a priority,” the report had noted. It also found instances where prisoners were provided only torn mats for bedding, lacked access to electricity and clothing, and were housed in rooms where toilets formed part of the living space. The findings led to a Public Interest Litigation in the Bombay High Court, which subsequently directed authorities to improve conditions at the facilities.

Prayas, a field action project of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and a member of the state’s inter-departmental committee on prisoners, had also pursued the issue and supported the recommendation to shut the facilities.

“With this, all undertrials will be kept in prisons managed by the prison department with the same facilities that are available to prisoners under the Maharashtra Prison Manual. It does away with an archaic system of sub-jails which were under the control of tehsildars, housing prisoners in one or two rooms with poor sanitation, ventilation and lack of standardisation in food and health care,” said Dr Vijay Raghavan, project director of Prayas.
Vijay Raghavan, project director of Prayas.