PANAJI
To tide over the shortage of guards in Colvale Central Jail, Prisons Department has mooted the idea to deploy an Indian Reserve Battalion (IRB) platoon to keep watch on the inmates lodged in different blocks.
The state-of-the-art jail houses around 694 convicts and undertrials and the staff crunch has added to the workload of the existing strength.
"The Jail has a shortage of 40 staff. The process to recruit candidates to fill in the vacancies is underway, but until then, we can use the service of the IRB personnel. I have therefore decided to submit a proposal to the Director General of Police (Jaspal Singh) to allow deployment of one platoon of the IRB in the Central Jail," Inspector General of Prisons (IGP) Bosco George said.
The platoon, he said, will consist of 25-odd personnel who will assist the jail guards on duty within the premises. The IRB personnel, at present, are posted in the outer ring of the jail and tasked with frisking the staff, inmates, and visitors before they enter the premises.
George (IPS), also the IRB Commandant, opined the temporary deployment of the IRB staff inside the jail will help share the workload.
“The existing strength is overburdened though they work in shifts. If there’s no solution until full-fledged recruitment, there could be unrest and frustration among the present staff,” another officer said.
The Goan, in September, had reported that a scuffle between two rival groups of undertrials in the Jail was due to a lack of staff manning the blocks. The three inmates – two of whom were Nigerian nationals – had sustained injuries in a fight that broke out over a petty issue. The NDPS block, where the incident occurred, had only one jail guard Mahesh Naik on duty while the rest allegedly had failed to report to work.
"Against the sanctioned six jail guards, the NDPS block has four. On the night of the incident, the block had three absentees while only one was on duty," a jail official had claimed.
