State Prisons Dept software awarded South Asia & Asia Pacific Award

Tribune News Service

Shimla, December 27

‘JailVaarta’, a project of the Himachal Pradesh Prisons Department, has been awarded The Manthan – South Asia & Asia Pacific Award 2104, under the e-governance category. The ‘JailVaarta’ software enables prisoners, their relatives or visitors to interact visually through video conferencing. It was developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Himachal Pradesh, and the Prison Department.

Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) SR Mardi said the low-cost solution used the NIC video portal software to conduct video conferencing and relatives of the prisoners could use the facility using any computer with web camera, microphone or headphones, connected to it through internet.

The Prisons Department is the first in the country to provide the video-conferencing facility to prison inmates and so far about 1,100 video-conferencing requests have been received, which include 52 requests from the United Kingdom (UK) and 22 from Finland.

The video-conferencing facility has several advantages, such as the facility for relatives to interact from their homes, avoiding the social stigma of visiting a jail, saving time and money and eliminating the chances of illegal items being passed on to the prisoners.

Moreover, investigation officers can also question the under-trial through JailVaarta, in which all security features have been incorporated.

Mardi said the Prisons Department website was a part of the web portal of interoperable criminal justice system of the state which had been developed for speedy justice by facilitating data exchange between courts, police, prosecution, jails and forensic laboratories. The award was presented to the JailVaarta team by the Education Minister of Sri Lanka, Bundala Guna Wardhana, in The Manthan award ceremony held in New Delhi recently.

The interoperable criminal justice system of the state was earlier conferred the Skoch Order of merit- digital inclusion, during the conference on digital India held in New Delhi on September 19 and 20 this year, he added.