It’s 5 in the evening, time to close shop and head for prison cell

Govardhan Singh, one of the two prisoners whose sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, gets into business at 7am, and manages to rake in quite a bit before he shuts shop in the evening. Between rolling out paans, he drops into the jail twice, to mark his attendance. “I avenged my uncle’s death, which is why I’m behind bars,” he shrugs. Accused of murdering five persons 15 years ago, Govardhan has been an inmate of the jail since 1985, and has no clue if he’ll ever walk free. The betel shop gives him approximately Rs 50 per day, of which he hands over Rs 300 per month to the jail.

Just a few yards away, Rajkumar Rastogi supervises a tailoring shop, which helps him finance his son’s education at Lucknow University. Once it’s 5pm, his son takes over the store. Rastogi, who’s facing a life sentence for murder, has been at the jail since 1995. “I am happy that I can support my family despite being lodged in the jail,” he says.

This unusual lot of shop-keepers are free to go to the market, but with a police guard in tow. “This is a unique feature not found in any jail in the country. We help these convicts become self-sufficient during the period they stay behind bars,” Suresh Chand Srivastava, senior superintendent of the jail, told The Indian Express.

In fact, getting into this jail is a tough task. In general, convicts facing life term are incarcerated here only after their conduct has been closely scrutinised. Once inside, their conduct is monitored for another six months, and only a chosen few are permitted to run shops outside of the jail campus. Some model prisoners are even allowed to live a kilometre away from the jail, in a `jail farm’ along with their families. The only condition imposed is that they have to mark their daily attendance. At present, 15 prisoners — three of them with their families — facing life imprisonment are living outside the jail at the `Mukta Gaon’ (free village). “We do not feel that we are in a jail. We do normal things like farming and other chores, like we would have done back home in our villages,” remarks Virendra Singh.

Another unique feature in this jail is that on the basis of their track records, the prisoners are allowed to go on a 15-day “home leave” to their families and villages.

These experiments are also money-spinners for the jail, which earns around Rs 87 lakh per year from income generating activities by the 272 prisoners. “This is an open jail and we try to rehabilitate the inmates,” says the superintendent.