Visitors at Gujarat jails to come under e-surveillance

Under a project being developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of the Department of Information Technology, every inmate and the visitor who meets him or her will be photographed and their biometric details will be stored in a central database accessible by authorised jail personnel and the home ministry.

The project, sponsored by the Department of IT, Gujarat government, has already been piloted at the Ahmedabad central jail and will soon be extended to Vadodara as well. Introduced at the Tihar Jail four years back, the project involves setting up of infrastructure like a web cam, a fibre optic cable with a network of 250 nodes and a database management system.

Under the system, details like photograph and fingerprints of the visitor, the inmate they meet, their personal details, time and date of the visit, their possessions amongst others will be stored on a web-based database making sifting through the bulky load of details much simpler.

"We have started implementing the bio-metric and database system for the 6,000-odd inmates in the Sabarmati Central Jail at Ahmedabad. Work on developing the database is still on and so far we see that the system ensures that the person who visits is the same person who goes out. This also gives us an authentic profile of the visitor," said a highly placed official at the Sabarmati Central Jail.

There are around 2,500 inmates in the Vadodara central jail for whom the system could get the clearance from the home ministry soon.

With the fibre optic network, jail officials will also be able to communicate with the home ministry and their counterparts in other jails through video-conferencing technology. Also, every jail complex will be secured with a close-circuit television system.

After Tihar Jail, the prison management system has been rolled out in central jails in Trivandrum, Kolkata and Ranchi.

An official of NIC said that typically jails with a sizeable number of inmates would most likely be identified by the home ministry to implement the project to make database management of inmates and visitors a less complicated task.