In February 2014, a real estate developer made his way nervously to the prison ward of Mumbai’s St. George’s Hospital. He had recently bagged a Slum Rehabilitation Authority project, a lucrative business opportunity in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets.
For over a month, he had been getting threatening phone calls from the “underworld”. They ordered him to pay a hefty extortion amount or stop work on the project. When he refused to pay heed, a henchman turned up at his doorstep. The builder was forced to accompany him to the hospital. Awaiting him in the prison ward, in perfect good health, was Ravi Mallesh Bora alias D.K. Rao, a top aide of gangster Rajendra Nikhalje alias Chhota Rajan.
Three years later, in 2017, the builder finally approached the Mumbai Crime Branch. Its Crime Investigation Unit found that Rao had been comfortably running his extortion racket from Taloja Central Jail in Navi Mumbai, where he had been lodged for years. He had also been in direct touch with his boss Rajan, who was giving him instructions and seeking regular updates on the dhandha (business).
This revelation of the prison cell serving as Rao’s ‘office’, however, wasn’t an unexpected one. In 2015, a surprise check of Rao’s cell at Taloja had unearthed three mobile phones. The call records showed he had made hundreds of calls over the last three months, many of them to international numbers. The builder’s complaint in 2017 only further confirmed what the police already knew: prison is not even a speed bump for criminal elements who know their way around.
But it isn’t only established international criminal syndicates such as Rajan’s that run their operations from inside prisons. Local gangsters do it too. The name Uday Pathak, though not as widely known as Chhota Rajan or Dawood Ibrahim, still strikes fear in northern Mumbai’s Kurar and surrounding areas.
Turf control
In June 2011, Pathak and his gang kidnapped four men of a rival gang to avenge a petty insult. They took them to a forest area near Kurar, tortured and mutilated them, and finally burned their bodies. Pathak was arrested and was undergoing trial when he learned that some local toughs were trying to take over his area. He arranged for mobile phones and relayed instructions to his friends on the outside to make it known that he was still a force to reckon with. This was in mid-2015.
So, a few months later, in November 2015, a gunman walked up to a construction site in Kurar, fired a single round, dropped four pieces of paper on the ground and fled the scene. One of the notes had the name Uday Pathak scribbled on it, with a demand for money. The other three had the names of local political figures and businessmen, indicating that they too could be Pathak’s targets.
Other examples of hit jobs being ordered from prison include those of Yusuf Suleiman Kadri alias Yusuf Bachkana, also a Chhota Rajan aide, who, in 2013, ordered a hit on a Mumbai builder for refusing to pay extortion money; and Prashant Rao, an aide of gangster Yusuf Lakdawala, who instructed three of his henchmen to kill a businessman for the same reason in November 2016. Bachkana was then lodged in Hindalga Central Jail in Belgaum, while Rao was in Nashik Central Jail. Luckily, the targets in both the cases survived the attempts on their lives.
Clearly, these gangsters wouldn’t have been able to order hit jobs and communicate with their associates unless they had access to mobile phones — an access that is illegal. So how did they manage to get their hands on one?
In the sprawling 212-acre complex of Chennai’s Puzhal Central Prison, undertrials were being lined up for security check at the gate. Under the watchful eyes of the warders, they walked through the scanning machines one by one.
A prisoner who passed through the metal detector without triggering an alert caught the guards’ attention. There was something unusual about his gait. Suspecting foul play, prison officials searched him. They found nothing on his body. A careful examination of his footwear revealed that one of the shoes had been customised to accommodate mobile phone components. He had cut open the grooves in the sole to fix a handset, battery, and charger. He had been trying to walk without giving putting too much weight on one of the shoes, the one with the mobile phone parts. This ended up arousing suspicion and led to the exposé.
This is just one of several options used by prisoners to smuggle prohibited articles into prison. Despite thorough frisking, round-the-clock security, watch towers, and an extensive CCTV network, inmates sneak in contraband at will.
But it’s not only phones that are sneaked in. A 21-year-old ex-inmate who spent over six months in Delhi’s Rohini district jail in 2017 recalls how “everything that’s small in size” was smuggled inside. “Be it drugs in the form of powder or pills, mobile phones, or pocket knives.”
Three layers of checking
Sitting in his East Delhi home, the undertrial, who was in jail on charges of rash driving and attempt to commit culpable homicide, shares a story about how a fellow inmate managed to take a scalpel into Rohini prison.
“He is not a noted criminal,” he says, refusing to take names. “But he has been in and out of prison several times. All the warders knew him personally. Now, anyone who comes to the prison goes through three layers of checking before they meet the prisoner. But often, if a lawyer has been visiting regularly, he can get in without a thorough check,” he says. “You have to understand that there’s a nexus at play here.”
He said that in this particular case, the advocate had concealed the scalpel on the inside of the right arm of his black coat, after making an incision in the cloth. When he reached the room where the prisoner was waiting for him, he told the warder that he needed the prisoner to sign a document. “The prisoner signalled to the warder to let him sign in person instead of the document being carried to him by the jail staff. The warder agreed. The prisoner and the lawyer met and ‘shook hands’. And the scalpel passed from the lawyer to his client.
“The warder knew what was going on,” claims the young undertrial out on bail, adding, “They play a major role in the movement of contraband into and within the prison. Parents, relatives and other visitors can also transfer contraband like the lawyer did, provided they have connections.”
But the smuggling of contraband into jail premises doesn’t necessarily have to be through the main gate. Court meetings are a popular rendezvous used to transfer drugs and phones to prison inmates. If that proves too tough to manage, you could simply chuck stuff into the prison. If you have a good arm, you can fit whatever it is into a tennis ball and throw it, like a fielder at deep fine leg hurling the ball to the wicket-keeper.
“Some prison walls are accessible from the road,” points out Ajay Kashyap, Director-General of Tihar jail. “For instance, one of the boundary walls of Rohini jail is close to a flyover. Often, tennis or Cosco balls are recovered from the prison backyard. We have found them filled with a note or small articles,” says Kashyap, adding that if a prisoner is found with such balls, he is immediately punished. He either has some of his perks — such as what he can buy from the canteen — reduced, or is denied meetings with his family.
A.G. Maurya, former Deputy-Inspector General (DIG) of Prisons, Tamil Nadu, echoes Kashyap’s point that contraband is often thrown into the prison campus.
“Puzhal Central Prison is a huge campus. It has deserted places full of thick vegetation, where construction materials have been dumped, and even some unused buildings. When the prisoners go to the court for remand extension every 15 days, or meet visitors at the prison, they fix on a date and time when their contact will throw the parcel containing mobile phones, cigarettes or drugs. They even co-ordinate this using mobile phones already smuggled into the prison,” says Maurya, adding that inmates have full knowledge of the prison topography and the places that are beyond the reach of surveillance. “Sometimes they even pick up a parcel after a few days. The guards can’t patrol the whole campus all the time. A few places are not visible to the armed guards on watch towers.”
Lucrative barters
But why do inmates resort to such smuggling knowing full well that they will spend more time in jail if caught? Is it primarily to run their criminal activities, as in the case of the Rajan gang members? Is it to protect themselves? Or is it just addiction — either to mobile phones or drugs? Prison officials say that money is the big driver.
A cigarette that retails for ₹10 in the outside world is worth 10 times more inside the prison. “It is the addiction of other inmates to tobacco that makes some prisoners take the risk of smuggling. They get to make at least 10 times the money they invest in smuggling these substances. The income earned is paid to the families outside. This is a working revenue model,” says an official from Puzhal prison.
Prisons also tend to have a vibrant barter trade. An inmate might offer a pack of beedis in exchange for being able to make a phone call to his family. Another will offer WhatsApp on his phone for an hour in exchange of drugs. Sometimes, however, the motivation could be as simple as wanting to take a selfie.
In March this year, the administration of Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district went into a tizzy after a rather unremarkable selfie went viral. The photograph showed three young men trying to squeeze into the frame against a dimly lit background.
One of the three men in the photograph, Vijay Choudhary, was an undertrial at the time, lodged in the district jail on charges of attempt to murder. The other two had murder charges against them. While the selfie has sparked an official probe, jail officials believe the mobile phone was thrown into the jail from outside the boundary wall, which is close to a densely populated area, by another undertrial who was out on bail.
Back in February, in an almost identical incident, an undertrial lodged in Basti district jail posted a selfie with two murder convicts. In this case, too, a probe has been ordered. Officials suspect the inmates could have received the mobile phone from an outsider during visiting hours. The role of the guards is also being investigated.
On March 15, Tamil Nadu’s Prison Department informed a Division Bench of the Madras High Court that it had brought down the number of illegal mobile phones and SIM cards recovered from the State’s prisons from 836 and 646, respectively, in 2013 to 288 and 209 in 2017. On hearing the statistic, Justice V. Parthiban asked, “Fine that you have seized these many cell phones and SIM cards, but how did they get into the prisons in the first place? Is it because of laxity or connivance of the officials?”
Well, prison officials from five States — Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Delhi and West Bengal — point to three factors as primarily responsible for the rampant smuggling of prohibited articles into prisons: corruption and laxity among jail officials, lack of an adequate number of guards, and overcrowding of the jails.
P.K. Mishra, Inspector General of Prisons, Uttar Pradesh, candidly says that lapses take place “only because of human error, either through negligence or corruption.”
Manpower crunch
An official with a Mumbai prison says that in a jail, which is a world unto itself, a well placed currency note here and there can go a long way in ensuring a comfortable life, be it for undertrials or convicts. Rao, for instance, was in prison to serve a sentence in an extortion case. But thanks to mobile phone access, he could spend his jail time running Rajan’s extortion racket.
“Manpower is also an important factor,” says the official who did not wish to be named. “While there are several vacant posts in the Prisons Department, almost all the prisons in Maharashtra are filled beyond capacity. Managing such a large number of prisoners is not always possible. Those with the means to bribe prison guards waste no time in doing so, and they reach a tacit understanding. The prisoner also ensures his activities remain under the radar so that the guards do not get into trouble. As for the guards, they do everything from turning a blind eye to actively helping the smugglers.”
Overcrowding and understaffing are definitely critical issues in Uttar Pradesh. The State has 70 jails. Their total sanctioned capacity is 58,000. But the actual number of inmates is almost double that. At the same time, as against the required staff strength of at least 9,000 warders, the State has only 4,000. With such mismatched numbers, combating smuggling was never going to be easy.
Smuggling a prohibited article into a prison is a punishable offence under Section 42 of The Prisons Act, 1894. The list of prohibited articles is long and varied: apart from mobile phones, it includes drugs, intoxicants, alcoholic drinks, smoking pipes, wireless sets, metal, expensive jewellery, arms and ammunition, explosive materials, and even items as innocuous as a rope or a pen nib.
But if the use of mobile phones in prison is both illegal and widespread, it raises an obvious logistical question: how do these inmates charge their phones, that too without getting caught?
R. Duraisamy, who retired as DIG of Prisons a couple of years ago, says there are only two possibilities: either the jail warders help the inmates for a fee or the prisoners charge the phones in their cells. “Since the cells now have lights and fans, some prisoners know the technique of pulling out live wires and using them for charging the phone. Once the charging is done, they manoeuvre the wires back to their original position.”
To the question of how many of the contraband seizures have resulted in convictions, prison officials say that on most occasions the prisoners plead ignorance even when the seizures are made in their own cells. So such seizures would have to be treated as abandoned articles until technical evidence proves otherwise.
So what’s the best remedy? As if to underscore Tamil Nadu’s statistics, Mishra says that over the years, smuggling cases have been reduced substantially by checking instances of human error. This has been done through two means — punishment and posting.
In Uttar Pradesh, officers found incorrigible were ordered compulsory retirement or even terminated from service, while more competent officers with a higher level of integrity were posted in more sensitive jails, says Mishra. The State is also looking at a technological fix. On April 5, it sanctioned additional CCTVs in 43 jails across the State, at a cost of ₹2.4 crore.
Will legislation help?
West Bengal, which has one of the highest prison occupancy rates in the country (102.9% at the end of 2015), is so vexed with the problem of mobile phones being smuggled into prison that it is considering a special legislation to tackle the problem.
A senior officer with the West Bengal Correctional Homes administration said that during the 22 months that he was in charge, about 1,000 unauthorised mobile phones were recovered from prison inmates. On an average, 600-700 mobile phones are seized every year from the State’s prisons.
So, West Bengal is considering an amendment to The West Bengal Correctional Services Act, 1992, making the possession of mobile phone by an inmate a punishable act. The amendment has provisions mandating additional jail term for inmates found in possession of mobile phones.
Maharashtra Prisons Department uses a different strategy — cultivating its own informants among the prisoners, who pass on timely information. The informants, however, lead a highly risky life as the slightest suspicion can result in death in the middle of the night.
The general wisdom among prison administrators seems to be that even with CCTV cameras, informers, rigorous checks, and upright warders, smuggling cannot be controlled beyond a point given the sheer number of inmates in Indian prisons. Tihar’s top boss Kashyap sums it up, “Where there is human involvement, 100% perfection is not possible.”
(Reporting by Gautam S. Mengle in Mumbai, Hemani Bhandari in New Delhi, Omar Rashid in Lucknow, Shiv Sahay Singh in Kolkata & S. Vijay Kumar in Chennai.)
