Jail records, a click away in Karnataka

Bengaluru: The state prisons department, which is making all the aspects of prison management online, has digitized the records of over 26,000 jail inmates. This has enabled the prison authorities to access the complete details of a prison at the click of a button.

With this, Karnataka has become the first state in the country to make the details of all the inmates online. Some states have done it partially, while some others are yet to give momentum to the project. This has been done under the e-prisons project that falls under the Digital India programme.

The entire process of digitization took around three months. Though the actual number of prisoners across the state is around 14,400 (around 4,000 convicts and around 10,000 undertrials), the prison department has digitized the records of those who were inmates in the jails since 2000 onwards.

The digital record of the inmates have details of prisoners such as name, age, address, in which police station case was registered, under what section, the status of the case, etc. Besides, their photograph, finger prints and iris are also updated.

“It was the direction of the Ministry of Home Affairs to all prison department of all the states to digitize the records. The purpose behind this is to have a complete database of the all the inmates in the country. It will also enable us to track how many inmates are lodged in any particular prison. Besides, it will also help the prison staff to know whether any particular inmate has a criminal record as soon as he is brought to any jail in the state,” an official said.

Following Karnataka, other states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar, Mizoram and others are also digitizing their jail inmates records in consultation with the officials of the Karnataka state prison department.