Blind cams guard Birsa jail - At central prison, surveillance lax for two months

A.S.R.P. Mukesh, TT, Ranchi, Nov. 1: Birsa Munda Central Jail - one of five high-security prisons in the state and the most populated - has gone partly blind, causing disquiet among officials particularly in the wake of yesterday's jailbreak in Bhopal that ended in a gory encounter.

More than 50 per cent of surveillance cameras at the prison in Hotwar are lying defunct for two months now, leaving the sprawling 68-acre premises vulnerable to a security breach, especially when it hosts 2,786 inmates, including two dozen Maoists, against a sanctioned capacity of 2,700.

The 22-odd CCTV cameras were damaged in lightning strikes and thunderstorms during monsoon, sources said, but there is still no official word on when they might be operational again.

Although Ranchi jail has never encountered a breakout in recent years, instances of convicts fleeing other prisons in the state have been common. In 2014, 17 undertrials had attempted a daring escape while in transit from court to Chaibasa Divisional Jail. Police had shot dead two and injured three while the rest succeeded in their plan.

Three hardcore Maoists, who were being tried for manslaughter in Saranda, had also made good their escape from Chaibasa Divisional Jail in 2011. Earlier, in 2007, criminals had escaped from Chas Divisional jail.

Besides the constant threat of jailbreak, clashes are common in all state prisons, not to forget frequent recovery of banned items like knives, razors and phones.

Under these circumstances, foolproof electronic surveillance is imperative at central prisons, but is conspicuously absent at Birsa jail, which also grapples with perennial manpower crunch and has a not-so-tall boundary of 10ft.

"Lightning and storms damaged 22 of the 40 CCTV cameras we had. Also, the master console of some cameras were charred. The remaining 18 cameras don't cover the entire premises. So, we are on our toes, particularly after eight Simi members broke out of Bhopal jail, which had a 32-feet-high boundary mounted with wires, and were later shot dead in a police encounter," said a prison official, requesting anonymity.

It is the same story with jammers, which are supposed to block cellphone signals to prevent inmates from colluding with their aides outside. "There are six (jammers). They work on and off. At the moment, they are working, but they can only block 2G signals when there are 3G and 4G phones in the market," the official said.

Birsa jail superintendent Ashok Kumar Choudhary conceded that more than half the surveillance cameras are defunct. "JAP-IT (an arm of the state IT department), along with Bharat Electronics (the agency that installed the CCTV cameras), does annual maintenance work. We are in touch with both," Choudhary said without committing on when the gadgets would be operational again.