By Archana Sharma

Jaipur, Jun 8 (IANS): The pandemic blues have failed to stop Rajasthan prisoners from meeting their families as the jail administration arranged the highest number of video conferences for them to ensure that they can e-meet their families.

Rajasthan is on top in arranging these e-meetings of prisoners with 1,00,746 meets while the second state is Bihar which arranged 58,891 virtual meetings for prisoners.

The third in the list is Delhi which arranged 34,368 video conferences for prisoners and their families while Gujarat has 33,821 meetings and Madhya Pradesh had 19,132 meetings.

This is the data collected from April 1 to June 5 this year when the second wave started making an impact and different states were in lockdown for different periods.

Director General prisons, Rajasthan, Rajiv Dasot, said the initiative was taken following the guidelines and advisory issued by the apex court which said depression in prisoners can increase if they stay away from their family members.

Hence we launched the initiative of arranging video conferencing with families and ensured that a prisoner e-meets with his family members once in a week. Earlier, the jail inmate was allowed to talk to his/her family members on phone, he added.

Sources said the prisoners in states like Assam, Manipur, Maharashtra, Haryana, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Sikkim and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands stayed away from their families in totality while in states like Punjab, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Goa they could not cross the benchmark of 50 with respect to these e-meetings.

The Tata Trust Justice report had adjudged Rajasthan as the number one state in terms of prison arrangements this year while the state ranked 12th last year.