VADODARA, June 24: If high-profile former Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan is credited with introducing identity cards for voters, Superintendent of Vadodara Central Jail R N Meena can reportedly claim the distinction for instituting the trend for photographing convicts and undertrials in the country.Reportedly no other jail in the country - including the dreaded Tihar or prisons in the militancy-plagued Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab or the north-eastern States - has ever photographed its inmates, though police stations do maintain records of photographs of the more notorious criminals.The scheme's raison d'etre is said to be the increasing number of escapes from the local jail. Some 96 undertrials and convicts have run away from the VCT in the past 10 years, Meena said, adding that less than one-third of them had been rearrested.The immediate trigger for the introduction of the scheme is the daring escape of a prisoner while supposedly guarding the jail's farmlands. The jail superintendent said he was worried about how to re-arrest him, simply because there was no photographic evidence of his identity. Though the escapee eventually returned to the jail, the train of thought gave rise to the scheme, he added.Meena then wrote to Inspector-General of Police (Prisons) K S Chaturvedi, seeking permission to start photographing all the jail inmates. Appreciating the relevance of the proposal, Chaturvedi then gave Meena the go-ahead.Three photographs of each convict will be prepared: one each for the convict's history-sheet (personal file) and the conviction file, while the third will be a spare.
