The Supreme Court has found considerable discrepancy in the expenditure incurred by various States on jail inmates — from Nagaland clocking ₹65,468 per inmate a year to Punjab spending just over ₹16,000.
Unearthing “huge discrepancy” in jail accounts, a Bench, led by Justice Madan B. Lokur, asked the Home Ministry to take the assistance of the Comptroller and Auditor-General to come out with a scheme to audit the expenditure in jails on or before March 31. The court wants to verify if the money spent was for the welfare of the prisoners.
“There is a huge discrepancy in this regard which needs to be looked into,” Justice Lokur observed.
The Bench asked the government to take urgent steps to ensure proper training of jail staff after it was informed that barely 7,800 prison staffers out of 50,000 are trained. The Bench said lack of training was a crucial part of the “unhappy state of affairs” among prison staffers. “To standardise the training to be given to various categories of staff in prisons, we direct the Home Ministry to take urgent steps to prepare training manuals for various categories of staff and officers. Steps should be taken in this regard on or before March 31, 2017,” the court said.
