#rti requests

With no substantive response from central or state governments, Swamy and Turi put together a research team to map the state of undertrials in Jharkhand’s prisons. Travelling across the state, and filing right-to-information requests with the police in each district—most went unanswered—the team released a report in 2016 with the life histories of 102 UAPA undertrials statewide. The undertrials were overwhelmingly Adivasis and Dalits, whose cases languished in the criminal-justice system for up to 10 years. For example, the report had the story of Shobha Munda, a woman with eight pending cases in a court in the southern Jharkhand town of Ghatsila. She had not been able to appoint a “reliable lawyer” for her defense, though she had been in jail for “not less than four years already”. About 59% of households of undertrials in the report earned less than Rs 3,000 per month and were forced to sell assets, such as goats, to meet bail conditions or legal expenses.