KATHMANDU, AUGUST 3
The government is set to increase the daily allowance of prisoners and detainees by 33 per cent, effective from the running fiscal. Currently, prisoners and detainees get daily allowance of Rs 60 each.
The Ministry of Home Affairs informed that it had obtained consent from the Ministry of Finance for the proposed increment in daily allowance for prisoners and detainees serving sentence or awaiting final verdict of the courts. The prisoners and detainees currently get an allowance of Rs 60 per day. The government had increased the daily allowance from Rs 40 to Rs 60 in 2018. After implementation of the proposed 33 per cent increment, the prisoners and detainees will be entitled to Rs 79.0 per day. An official at MoHA said it had been working to amend the existing Prison Regulation to increase the facilities for prisoners and detainees.
As per the MoHA, cash being provided to the children of prisoners for milk would also be increased from the existing Rs 35. Prisoners and detainees had long been demanding that the government increase their daily livelihood allowance, stating that 750 grams of rice and allowance provided by the government on a daily basis were too little to keep up with the cost of living, bearing in mind the skyrocketing inflation. A recent annual report of the Office of the Auditor General had stressed the need to increase their daily allowance. "It seems to be necessary to review the allowance in line with the current market price. While reviewing the allowance, the government should fix the allowance for prisoners in the Tarai, mountain and hilly regions separately in accordance with the cost of living in a particular geographical region," the report suggested.
The country has 74 prisons. Bhaktapur, Bara and Dhanusha districts do not have any prison, while Kathmandu and Dang have two prisons each. Prisons across the country with a total capacity to accommodate 16,000 persons are crammed with more than 24,000 jailbirds, as per the Department of Prison Management. Similarly, the MoHA said it had drafted the Open Prison Operation Regulation in a bid to pave the way for implementation of the concept of open prison in the country. The Criminal Offences (Sentencing and Execution) Act, 2017 stipulates a provision for allowing inmates, who have served at least two-thirds of their sentence, to be sent to an open prison.
A version of this article appears in the print on August 4, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.
