A damning audit finds Punjab’s 26 jails crammed beyond capacity for three consecutive years — with missing police escorts, stalled construction, and a legislature that declined to even discuss the findings.
| 25,824 | 30,000+ | 4,145 | 148,274 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total capacity | Actual inmates | Excess prisoners | Hearings missed |
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has laid bare a sustained humanitarian and administrative failure inside Punjab’s prison network — one that saw tens of thousands of human beings warehoused in facilities the government’s own standards deemed unfit for habitation, over a period of at least three years.
The report, recently tabled in the Punjab Legislative Assembly but never taken up for discussion, found that as of March 2023, the state’s 26 jails held over 30,000 inmates against a combined capacity of 25,824 — an excess of 4,145 prisoners. The situation among women’s facilities mirrored the broader crisis, with every women’s jail in the state continuously exceeding its sanctioned strength throughout the three-year audit period from 2020 to 2023.
Undertrials and the escort crisis
The CAG’s investigators identified two interlocking causes driving the overcrowding. The first — and most structurally corrosive — is the prolonged detention of undertrial prisoners, who account for the bulk of the prison population and who, in theory, retain a presumption of innocence.
Between 2020 and 2023, out of 557,412 scheduled court appearances across Punjab’s jails, a staggering 148,274 hearings — approximately 27 percent — could not proceed simply because police escorts were unavailable to transport the prisoners to court. The direct consequence was that undertrial prisoners remained locked up for far longer than legally or morally justified, swelling headcounts that the infrastructure could not absorb.
“Overcrowding could have been alleviated by shifting certain male prisoners to open jails — yet only 30 per cent of eligible prisoners were actually transferred.” — CAG Report on Punjab Jails, tabled 2025–26
The Public Accounts Committee had previously taken note of the worsening situation and directed the prison administration to regulate the inmate population. Those directives, the CAG found, were not acted upon. The problem persisted unchanged.
Mansa: the worst case
Among all facilities examined, Mansa Jail emerged as the most alarming single data point in the entire report. Designed to hold 332 prisoners, the facility was found to be housing 629 inmates — nearly double its sanctioned capacity, a figure representing an 89 percent overshoot that the CAG attributed to delays in both the construction and repair of barracks.
The conditions that result from such density — the absence of adequate sleeping space, sanitation facilities overwhelmed beyond function, the practical impossibility of maintaining any programme of rehabilitation or vocational training — were described by the CAG as rendering the physical environment unfit for human habitation.
A decade of delay: the Nabha file
- 2016: District Jail Nabha declared structurally unsafe. No immediate action taken.
- 2021: Nabha finally accorded Maximum Security Jail status — five years after condemnation.
- June 2023: Construction of replacement facility formally commences.
- May 2024: Only 36 percent of construction complete, as the unsafe structure continues in use.
The Nabha case illustrates the second systemic failure identified in the audit: a chronic inability to complete infrastructure projects designed specifically to ease overcrowding. Capital works sanctioned to create new capacity or rehabilitate condemned facilities have, without exception, fallen behind schedule — in some cases by years or decades.
Open jails: an underused escape valve
The CAG noted that a partial solution was available and was not being used. A number of male prisoners serving sentences for lower-risk offences are legally eligible for transfer to open jails — minimum-security facilities designed to offer a supervised but far less restrictive environment. The report found that only 30 percent of eligible prisoners had been transferred to such facilities, leaving a significant and readily available pressure valve largely unused.
The CAG report was tabled in the Punjab Legislative Assembly. No discussion on its findings took place within the House.
CITY-E-NEWS :- This article is based on the CAG Report on Punjab Jails tabled in the Punjab Legislative Assembly. All statistics are drawn directly from the audit document.
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