E-mulakat: Mangaluru dist prison shows good response, utilized facility 104 times

Prisons in Mangaluru, Bengaluru, Belagavi and Vijayapura districts have shown good response to the e-mulakat facility.

E-mulakat facilty is where prison inmates are allowed to speak to visitors via video call. E-mulakat was introduced by the Karnataka Prisons and Correctional Services Department across the State on December 2, 2020.

E-mulakat is available through the e-prison project, which was adopted by the department in nine Central Prisons, 21 district prisons, 27 sub jails, the open air jail in Koramangala and the special sub jail in KGF.

Expressing the need to encourage the use of e-mulakat for arranging meetings between visitors and prison inmates, in order to avoid direct physical interaction, Punya Salila Srivastava, Ministry of Home Affairs wrote to Chief Secretaries, Home Secretaries and Director-Generals of Prisons across the country in March 2020.

Visitors enter the National Prisons Information Portal (eprisons.nic.in), where they submit  details such as their name, address, Aadhaar number and mobile number in the “Visitor details” section. The details of the person they want to meet must be entered in the “To Meet” section.

The above information must be submitted a day before the meet. The concerned prison official will look into the request and allot a 30 minute slot, following which the visitor’s mobile will receive an SMS. The Prison Department will video call at the scheduled time and the concerned inmate will be allowed to speak for about 10 minutes.

An inmate can speak to a visitor once a week.

So far the Mangaluru District Prison has used the facility for about 104 times, where as Udupi District Prison has used it 18 times.

Alok Mohan, Director-General of Police (Prisons) asserted that e-mulakat is a new facility and hence it will take time for visitors to utilize it fully.

Informing  that the knowledge of this technology-driven initiative is not uniform, Alok added that there are some issues regarding the access to this facility.