The Punjab government has initiated the process to set up a high-security “radial jail”, a first-of-its-kind Central jail in the state, to lodge terrorists, high-risk prisoners, dreaded gangsters and hard-core criminals.
The tender for the construction works of the jail was recently floated. The jail will come up in an area of 50 acres in Gorsian Kadar Baksh village in Ludhiana district at a cost of Rs 100 crore and will have a capacity to lodge 300 prisoners. The construction of the jail was announced by Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann in June last year. As per a government functionary, “The tender for the construction works of the jail has been floated. We aim to get the jail constructed at the earliest possible.”
The entire funding for the jail would be provided by the Centre, said a Punjab government functionary. An official privy to the jail project, said that “the cellular prison” will have cells in “radial” blocks, which will help jail staff to monitor the prisoners effectively.
The details of the proposed jail indicate that it has been designed on the lines of the British colonial prison “the Cellular Jail”, notoriously referred to as Kala Pani, in Port Blair of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which had solitary confinement cells in blocks radiating from a central tower which served to keep a watch on inmates.
“The whole prison shall be made as a cellular prison and will be divided into various zones as per functional requirement, to avoid inter-mixing of similar gangs and confrontation of anti-gangs and curtail their movement,” said the jail department official dismissing that the jail pattern was akin to ‘Kala Pani’ jail which he said was “notorious” for all the “negative connotations” associated with that.
Elaborating on the upcoming jail in Ludhiana district, the official said “All the major as well as potentially vulnerable high risk prisoners will be transferred and lodged in this prison.”
An area of up to 50 meters around the outer boundary wall of the prison will be declared as a prohibited zone. Among other things, in what is known as “throw” from outside, the state prison department has been facing a major challenge to check the entry of prohibited items into the jail.
Another salient feature of the upcoming jail would be that it would house a dedicated court complex and video conferencing infrastructure for hearings inside the complex, to curtail the movement of the prisoners and in the process prevent scenarios where prisoners attempt to escape if taken outside the jail for court hearings. On similar lines, to avoid movement of prisoners outside the prison, in house hospital facilities would be provided in the jail.
