Uttar Pradesh jails to get video-conferencing facility

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Lucknow: Jails in Uttar Pradesh will soon be equipped with video-conferencing facility to help undertrials attend proceedings without being taken to courts. "We had been planning to find some way to avoid periodical transportation of undertrials to courts for seeking extension of their remand, which needs to be done every 14 days. Once the video-conferencing facility is in place, the task will become simple," state Additional Director General (Prisons) Sulkhan Singh told IANS here Saturday. The facility will be introduced in seven prisons at Meerut, Naini, Mirzapur, Ghaziabad, Kanpur, Varanasi and Lucknow in May. It will be extended to all the 62 jails in the state over the next five years, he said. "In Lucknow alone, 300-400 undertrials are taken from the local district jail to various courts every day. That involves huge logistics, apart from security threat," he said. Admitting that over 100 undertrials escape from police custody every year while travelling between jail and courts, he said, "The proposed video-conferencing arrangement will prove as a saviour for police too." Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Brij Lal described it as a "revolutionary step that would go a long way in sparing a large number of policemen, who could now be put to other good use".
Source: IANS
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