Challenges Facing Women in Indian Prisons: A Call for Reform

India incarcerates over 22,000 women, yet its prison system was built almost entirely with male inmates in mind. The result is a deeply mismatched infrastructure – one that leaves women facing overcrowding, poor hygiene, inadequate medical care, and systemic violations of their basic rights. Beyond their own suffering, thousands of children are caught in this system too – either living behind bars with their mothers or separated from them without adequate support. And cutting across all of this is a pattern of custodial violence that exposes a fundamental failure of accountability. India’s women prisoners are not a marginal concern; they sit at the intersection of gender inequality, poverty, and a criminal justice system long overdue for reform.

Living conditions in Indian prisons: a system not built for women 🔗

India’s prisons are chronically overcrowded. According to a 2023 report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, the national average occupancy rate stands at 130%, with states like Delhi pushing this figure to a staggering 200%. This overcrowding directly degrades living conditions – affecting ventilation, diet quality, access to clean water, and basic hygiene. For women, these conditions carry an additional, gender-specific burden.

Only 18% of female inmates in India have access to dedicated women’s prison facilities, as only 15 states and Union Territories operate women-specific prisons. The vast majority of incarcerated women are housed in segregated sections within male-dominated prisons – facilities that were never designed with their needs in mind.

Inadequate sanitation and menstrual hygiene 🔗

Sanitation remains one of the most persistently underfunded areas. Basic facilities like clean toilets, bathing areas, and access to menstrual hygiene products remain insufficient in many prisons. While the Ministry of Home Affairs has issued guidelines stating that sanitary pads should be provided to women prisoners, ground-level implementation is inconsistent and largely dependent on the individual prison administration.

The disproportionately low number of toilets relative to the population in women’s wards forces women to share facilities under deeply unhygienic conditions. Overcrowding has led to worsened hygiene, health problems, and significant psychological strain – all of which bear down more heavily on women who have gender-specific bodily needs that a male-centred system routinely fails to anticipate.

Healthcare gaps that disproportionately hurt women 🔗

Medical care within Indian prisons is severely underfunded. In earlier data, Indian prison authorities spent an average of approximately ₹10,800 per inmate per year on all needs combined – food, clothing, medical care, and education. The healthcare gaps go beyond mere underfunding. There are no separate medical or psychiatric wards for women in 19 states and 6 Union Territories. This means that women with reproductive health concerns, pregnancy-related needs, or mental health conditions are treated in the same wards as the general population – or not treated at all.

The Standing Committee recommended that pregnant women be permitted to give birth outside prison and receive proper prenatal and postnatal care, a recognition that the current system offers nothing close to adequate maternity support.

Limited access to legal aid 🔗

Legal vulnerability compounds every other problem. Female prisoners often lack an understanding of their legal rights; many are poor and illiterate, without the means to pay for legal counsel. This leaves them at risk of signing statements with serious legal consequences they may not understand, and of remaining in custody far longer than necessary as undertrial prisoners. Over 73% of India’s total prison population consists of undertrial prisoners – meaning people who have not been convicted of any crime. Women form a significant portion of this group, and their cases are often delayed or deprioritised.

While Article 39A of the Indian Constitution guarantees free legal aid, and the Supreme Court affirmed this right in landmark cases such as M.H. Hoskot v. State of Maharashtra, the actual provision of free legal assistance to incarcerated women remains patchy and inadequate in practice.

The impact on dependent children 🔗

Perhaps the most quietly devastating consequence of women’s incarceration in India is what it does to their children. India allows children to live with their incarcerated mothers until the age of six – a policy derived from the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in R.D. Upadhyay v. State of Andhra Pradesh, which sought to prevent the trauma of early separation. But what happens to children who grow up inside prison walls is its own kind of trauma.

Children growing up behind bars 🔗

In India, an average of about 1,586 children – roughly 9% of all women inmates – had children with them over the decade leading up to 2019, with three in four of these mothers being undertrial prisoners. More recent NCRB records indicate approximately 1,764 children currently living with incarcerated mothers. Among these, the majority are with undertrial mothers – meaning children are serving an informal sentence for a crime their mother has not even been convicted of.

Children confined with their mothers from infancy are entirely unaware of what a normal home looks like. The only male figures they see are authoritative police and prison officials. Everyday sights – stray animals, open roads – can be frightening because they have no frame of reference for a world outside prison walls. Their socialisation is profoundly disrupted by the custodial environment, and when they are finally separated from their mothers at age six, that too becomes a source of acute distress for both child and mother.

Inconsistent protections across states 🔗

The protections available to these children vary enormously depending on which state the mother is imprisoned in. The age up to which children may stay with their mothers ranges from just two years in Bihar to six years in states like Delhi and Assam. Provisions for food, medical care, and education differ just as widely. Many children below five years receive the same food as adult inmates. Studies have found that the quantity and quality of food provided to children in prisons falls short of prescribed nutritional standards, with mothers often sharing their own meagre rations with their children.

These children of incarcerated parents are often described as “hidden victims,” facing compounded challenges: psychological strain, exclusion from schooling, economic hardship, and deep social stigma. The Supreme Court directives are clear – children in prison are entitled to food, shelter, medical care, education, and recreational facilities as a matter of right. But without a uniform national framework and a functioning accountability mechanism, implementation remains a matter of individual prison administration.

Children left outside: the overlooked majority 🔗

The children who do not enter prison with their mothers face a different, but equally serious, set of challenges. Women prisoners have regularly reported having no idea where their children are after their arrest, because neither police nor prison authorities are required to proactively trace and support the children left behind. Some estimates suggest that as many as eight lakh (800,000) children in India do not follow their mothers into prison – a vast, largely invisible population with almost no formal safety net.

Custodial abuse and violence: when the system becomes the perpetrator 🔗

Custodial violence against women in Indian prisons is not an aberration – it is a documented pattern. NCRB data records 275 cases of custodial rape between 2017 and 2022, with perpetrators found not only in law enforcement but also in jails, remand homes, and hospitals. Women’s rights groups note that these figures almost certainly underestimate the true scale of the problem, given the near-total power imbalance between women in custody and those responsible for their safety.

Structural conditions that enable abuse 🔗

Several structural failures create conditions in which custodial violence can occur with limited accountability. In only 10 states and 1 Union Territory are women prisoners permitted to file complaints against jail staff for instances of abuse or harassment. In the remaining states, no such formal complaint mechanism exists. Additionally, matrons who oversee female prisoners have not received gender-specific training on how to conduct searches of women, leaving room for procedures that are themselves degrading and potentially abusive.

The broader context of staff shortages exacerbates these risks. The Parliamentary Standing Committee noted a high percentage of vacancies across all categories of prison staff, with women particularly underrepresented in prison-related jobs. A prison that is understaffed and without gender-trained personnel is one where abuse is both more likely to occur and less likely to be caught or reported.

Pregnancy in prison: an indicator of systemic failure 🔗

One of the starkest indicators of custodial abuse came from West Bengal, where the Calcutta High Court was informed of a significant number of pregnancies among female prisoners – a situation that raises serious questions about consent and safety within prison walls. Women’s rights activists have attributed such incidents to a lack of sensitisation and accountability within law enforcement systems. These are not isolated failures; they point to an institutional culture in which women behind bars are treated as existing outside the reach of the protections nominally guaranteed to them by law.

Weak legal framework for accountability 🔗

India’s prison governance still relies significantly on the Prisons Act of 1894 – colonial-era legislation that barely acknowledged gender differences, let alone provided protections against gender-based violence in custody. The Model Prison Manual of 2016 marked progress toward aligning prison administration with international standards, but implementation gaps remain substantial. The National Human Rights Commission has the authority to investigate rape cases involving police officers, but its reach and enforcement powers have limits. Women’s rights activists point to a persistent lack of sensitisation and accountability within law enforcement systems as the underlying cause of custodial violence remaining so difficult to address and prosecute.

What reform must look like 🔗

The problems facing women in Indian prisons are interconnected – you cannot fix the healthcare crisis without addressing overcrowding; you cannot protect children without fixing the legal aid gap that keeps mothers in custody indefinitely; you cannot end custodial violence without building accountability mechanisms. Several reform recommendations have been put forward by committees, courts, and civil society over the years.

The Standing Committee on Home Affairs recommended allowing babies born in prison to stay with their mothers until age 12 (up from the current six), filling all vacant prison staff posts within three months, introducing telemedicine to address healthcare gaps, and replacing imprisonment for minor offences with community service. The Krishna Iyer Committee as far back as 1987 called for more female prison staff, legal aid for women inmates, and explicit protection from custodial sexual abuse – recommendations that remain only partially implemented decades later.

Civil society organisations like Prayas (TISS) and the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative have long argued that the fundamental problem is a prison system built around the male prisoner as the archetype. The challenges faced by women inmates stem from the fact that prisons have traditionally been designed to suit the needs of men – and cosmetic reforms will not change that without a deliberate, gender-responsive redesign of facilities, staffing, training, and legal frameworks.

Replacing the outdated Prisons Act of 1894 with a comprehensive, gender-sensitive national legislation remains one of the most critical pending reforms. Some states, such as Maharashtra, have introduced progressive provisions including open prisons for women and specific maternity protections – showing that change is possible where political will exists. A uniform national standard, backed by independent monitoring and a grievance mechanism with real enforcement powers, is the structural shift the system needs.

What do you think? India’s courts have issued detailed guidelines protecting women and children in prisons for decades – yet ground-level implementation remains deeply inconsistent. What does it say about a society when its most vulnerable women are left without recourse even within the institutions meant to hold them accountable? And given that over 73% of India’s prison population are undertrial prisoners who haven’t been convicted of anything, how should the justice system rethink pre-trial detention – especially for women who are primary caregivers?

References

1. https://www.jusscriptumlaw.com/post/human-rights-of-female-prisoners-in-india
2. https://prsindia.org/policy/report-summaries/prison-conditions-infrastructure-and-reforms
3. https://www.thelawadvice.com/news/female-prisoners-were-far-more-affected-than-men-sc-panel
4. https://thelaw.institute/criminal-justice-processes/legal-reforms-women-prisoners-india/
5. https://www.togethermagazine.in/thestateofwomenprisoners.php
6. https://www.indiaspend.com/8-women-prisoners-children-live-with-them-heres-how-the-system-fails-them
7. https://ccrnusrlblog.wordpress.com/2026/02/11/from-neglect-to-nurture-reforming-prison-infrastructure-for-children-of-incarcerated-parents/
8. https://tiss.ac.in/uploads/files/Children_of_Women_Prisoners_-_The_Invisible_Trial.pdf
9. https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/rightsviews/2018/09/06/children-languishing-behind-bars-a-grim-reality-of-indian-prisons/
10. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/kids-parents-jail/
11. https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/when-bandi-both-game-and-life-children-indias-women-prisoners
12. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/editorials/custodial-rape-594848
13. https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/india