Undertrial custody crisis is our loss of human possibility

When we allow detention to stretch on without resolution, we weaken the social contract and diminish the promise of our own Constitution

- SRINATH SRIDHARAN

We speak often of liberty, fairness, and constitutional pride, yet our prisons tell a more troubling story.

The country’s prisons hold about 5.30 lakh inmates across more than 1,300 facilities, and roughly three-fourths of them are undertrials. The occupancy in prisons hovers around 121 per cent, and in some states the overcrowding is so severe that jails operate at nearly twice their sanctioned strength.

It reveals a reality in which the majority of those behind bars are not convicts but citizens waiting for the state to decide whether it believes them to be guilty at all.

Leaders across institutions speak earnestly of protecting the vulnerable, of compassion, of inclusion. Yet thousands remain in custody without the dignity of a timely hearing. If the state truly placed its citizens at the centre of governance, it would not allow liberty to be trapped in procedural delay. Public sermons on a just society cannot reconcile with the grinding indifference that lets so many lives fester in uncertainty.

And the damage does not end with the person detained. Children grow up with the memory of a parent taken away, carrying questions they cannot resolve and anxieties they cannot name.

Families slide into debt, siblings abandon studies, and entire households recalibrate their lives around an absence the state will never acknowledge. The punishment radiates outward until it reshapes the futures of those who were never part of the alleged offence.