New Delhi: The number of educated professionals in jails across the country is steadily rising. According to a data compiled by News18 based on ‘Prison Statistics of India’ for the years 2015, 2016 and the latest report of 2017, the number of graduate prison inmates has seen a notable year-on-year increase.
While 23,673 inmates who were lodged in India's prisons in 2015 were graduates, in 2016 their number increased to 25,396. The number of prisoners in the same category rose to 27,561 in 2017.
It is not just the absolute number of educated prisoners that has increased, the proportion of graduate prison inmates has also seen a rirse. While the proportion of graduate prison inmates in 2015 was 5.89%, in 2016, it increased to 5.9%. In 2017, the proportion of graduate prison inmates compared to the total prisoner population swelled to 6.1%.
In absolute numbers, post-graduate prison inmates have also gone up. On the other hand, the number of prisoners availing education inside jails has gone down, according to the report.
A total of 1,16,968 prisoners availed education in 2017, whereas the number was 1,30,443 in 2016. The numbers have also gone down in most categories of education — elementary, adult and computer course.
While 54,776 prisoners benefitted from elementary education in 2016, the number came down to 50,751 in 2017. In the category of ‘adult education’, the numbers came down from 53,965 to 44,338. Similarly, only 8,341 prisoners undertook computer course in 2017 compared to 8,779 in the previous year.
Higher education was the only category which showed a slight increase as the number of prisoners went up from 12,923 in 2016 to 13,538 in 2017.
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