14,000 inmates, 40,000 fingerprints, 60,000 photographs-the numbers are huge. But, the prison management system at the Tihar Jail makes administration a simple task

Prison, together with the police, judiciary and security apparatus are an integral part of any state as they play an important role with respect to prisoners' right. The Prison Management Systems (PMS) developed and implemented by the National Informatics Center (NIC) is an application, to give the Tihar Jail authorities the right tools to enhance efficiency of the administrative mechanism.

Nonetheless, implementing PMS in Tihar Jail, India's largest and Asia's second largest jail, unquestionably could not have been a cakewalk. The Tihar Jail houses over 14,000 inmates currently.

The application allows jail authorities to keep details pertaining to inmates, which includes category of the prisoner, criminal record, year of entry, biometric details at the time of their entry, prisoner number, photograph, personal details (age, address, information-related to family members, etc), medical details, lodging etc.

“The PMS allowed us to adopt a systematic and uniform approach for handling information about prisoners in Tihar,” said Sunil Kumar Gupta, Law Officer-Central Jail, Tihar.

“The application is good in dealing with over-populous prisons, such as Tihar, which house more inmates than their sanctioned capacity,” said Rajiv Saxena, Deputy Director General, NIC. The sanctioned capacity of Tihar is 5,648 prisoners.

PMS is a G2G and G2C e-governance tool. “Apart from creating transparency and simplifying information handling, the application has helped in creating a central database to provide information about all jails in the Tihar Prisons Complex,” said Saxena. Tihar is a huge complex spread over 400 acres, with over 10 jails.

Problems faced
Prior to the introduction of PMS in 2004, Tihar used the Prisons Inmates Information System adopted in 1994. All jails had been computerized then. There are eight NIC computer centers in the complex, one in each of the seven jails and one in the prison HQ.

All these computer centers are connected to each other through Fiber Optic LAN. Each center is equipped with a Pentium Pro Server and different nodes are given to different sections. There is a computer center at the Tihar Jail reception for public inquiry.

“Tihar's thick concrete walls were very difficult to drill. The problem was aggravated as there were no route maps,” he said. “Besides, due to fear of security issues, laborers were not allowed inside the jails, so we took the help of prison inmates.”

PMS works with the on-line working-pattern of the prisons (registration, movement and release). “The application has been crucial in providing information to prison officials, about inmates under their custody,” said Saxena. The prisoner database consists of details of 16,000 prisoners, 40,000 fingerprints, and 60,000 photographs.

Conceiving PMS
The seeds of the project were sown when the technical consultant to Tihar, NIC, conducted a full systems study of the various processes, nodes and flow of information within the jail. NIC had been supporting all computer operations of the Tihar Prisons Complex.

Ensuring scalability
The application can be adopted in local jails as per their requirements. Saxena said the application is supported by open database connectivity, which ensures access to any data from any application, regardless of which database management system (DBMS) is handling the data. Database connectivity makes it possible to connect it to the database as per requirements. All master codes, pertaining to 15 master tables, can be modified as per requirement.

Managing visitors
Besides this, the Visitors Management System (VMS) is another application that was introduced in 2005. The visitor database consists of details of 50,000 visitors along with their photographs. On an average, 3,000 visitors come to Tihar daily. It has benefited visitors who earlier had to wait for hours to get clearance.

The prison has further made way for using advance technology like use of video conferencing from jails to prisons, CCTV, DFMDs and HHMDs. According to Saxena, the prime intention is to integrate all the central jails of India with the police departments for sharing information about prisoners at the national level.

-URVASHI KAUL

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