Over 70% of India’s prisoners still awaiting trial: SC judge
POLITY – JUDICIARY
9 NOVEMBER 2025
- Vanita Devi (name changed), 36, is accused of killing her two children aged three and six in 2017. Married off at the age of 16, she spent most of her life facing domestic violence. Abandoned by her family for the crime she says she never committed, she spent over five years in jail.
- She finally got bail in 2022, thanks to a team from the Square Circle Clinic, a Fair Trial Programme (FTP) of the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. Since then, Ms. Devi, who is now diagnosed with mental illness, spends most of her time helping patients at a clinic, which gives her shelter.
- Ms. Devi’s is one of the over 5,000 cases taken up by the Square Circle Clinic. NALSAR initiated the FTP in 2019 and has worked with undertrials at the Nagpur and Yerawada Central Prisons.
- In its report of work done from 2019 to 2024, the Square Circle Clinic said that out of 5,783 cases dealt by it under FTP, 41.3% of the accused had no lawyer assigned for trial, while 51% had no documents needed to pursue the trial. As much as 58% suffered from at least one disability. It said that 67.6% of the undertrials covered in the programme belonged to disadvantaged caste groups and 79.8% worked in the unorganised sector. In five years, the Square Circle Clinic had filed bail applications in 1,834 cases and got 777 cases disposed of. In all, 1,388 clients were released in 2,542 cases.
- ‘Disturbing findings’
- Describing the key findings of the report as disturbing, Supreme Court Justice Vikram Nath on Friday called for urgent reforms in the way legal aid is provided to undertrials. He added that over 70% of India’s prison population consisted of people who had not yet been found guilty but they remained in jails. “And what is more concerning is that in most cases, they don’t even know that they have a right to [free] legal aid. Only 7.91% of the undertrials have utilised the legal aid available to them,” said Justice Nath at the release of the report on fair trials prepared by the Square Circle Clinic.
- Justice Nath criticised the way lawyers filed bail applications mechanically, without supporting documents or sureties that the accused could actually produce. “The accused cannot afford the bail amount, cannot find sureties, and he is back to square one,” he said, adding that he comes across one such case almost every day where an undertrial has spent time in prison exceeding the maximum sentence for the very offence he or she is accused of.