Technical glitch that robbed UP prisoners of precious weekly talktime with kin resolved

  • | Tuesday | 11th September, 2018

According to state prison directives, an inmate can interact with his relatives through a PCO set up in jails for five minutes every week. Now inmates will get a full 300 seconds talktime. Two contact numbers shared by the inmate, and verified by police, are fed into system and the inmate could interact with his relatives on those two numbers only. The inmates are provided smart cards with maximum recharge of Rs 100. “We have rectified the problem and are updating the software in all 70 jails.

Agra: For several weeks, Sandeep Kumar (name changed), an undertrial lodged in Agra jail for the past 14 years, failed to talk to his wife and children over the phone. According to state prison directives, an inmate can interact with his relatives through a PCO set up in jails for five minutes every week. However, a software glitch in the phone service has been robbing the prisoners of their precious talktime with their kin ever since the service was started in 2014.The glitch would start the stopwatch for 300 seconds and terminate the communication lines no matter even if the inmate’s call was connected or even received by his family members.Thankfully, the glitch was detected and updated in 20 of the 70 prisons. According to the authorities, the error will soon be rectified in other jails too.In the state’s 70 jails, there are around 92,830 prisoners, including 364 foreign prisoners.Though the PCO service was started in UP jails in 2014, but no official took note of the glitch until first week of December 2017, when superintendent of Agra district jail, Shashikant Mishra, discovered it while speaking with a few inmates of his jail during a counselling session.“Several inmates were showing signs of depression. During the counselling session, we found that they were not able to interact with their families which lived in remote villages despite a PCO facility in the prison. Further investigation revealed that the software glitch in phone service would start the stopwatch for 300 seconds and terminate the communication lines no matter even if the inmate’s call was connected or received by his family members,” Mishra told TOI.He said, “I intimated the headquarters about the problem and within a week the prison administration issued an order to the telecom service provider to rectify the glitch.”According to senior technicians of the telecom service provider, a kiosk with touchscreen and headphone was provided in the PCO. As soon the inmate provided his thumb print on the screen, the countdown of 300 seconds used to begin even before the inmate’s call was connected to his family. “We have rectified the problem and are updating the software in all 70 jails. Now inmates will get a full 300 seconds talktime. So far, we have covered 20 jails,” a senior employee of the telecom provider said.According to UP prison rules, an inmate can only interact with his relatives over the phone for five minutes every week and all calls are recorded. The inmates are provided smart cards with maximum recharge of Rs 100. Two contact numbers shared by the inmate, and verified by police, are fed into system and the inmate could interact with his relatives on those two numbers only.

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