With an aim to block cell phone network within the jail premises, the State Prisons Department is planning to install jammers in all the six Central jails. A team of Electronics Development Corporation of India (EDCI), which is credited to have installed jammers in most of the Indian prisons, will be entrusted with the task of installing these jammers.
The move was initiated to stop anti-social elements from running their illegal businesses from inside the jail premises.
In fact, a warden of the Guwahati Central Jail was arrested recently on the charge of supplying drugs to the inmates, leading to quite an uproar.
Sources in the prisons department informed that a team of experts from the Kolkata office of EDCI had visited the Guwahati Central Jail last month to assess the requirement, and the process of installation is going to start soon.
Once the installation is done in the Central Jail of Guwahati, the project will be replicated in other Central jails located at Nagaon, Tezpur, Jorhat, Dibrugarh and Silchar as well.
“We might go for a technology which would provide prison authorities with complete control over jamming of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) system within the prison premises. The system, if introduced, would white-list some specific phone numbers, which obviously will belong to select jail officials,” sources said.
“It will be a state-of-the-art system which would be able to block up to 4G mobile telecommunication signals inside the jails,” sources said, stating that some of the jails in Uttar Pradesh found that the jammer installed was not able to block 4G signals.
“Power cut is one issue we need to be wary of as the jammers become non-operational during power cuts. We will have to look into this aspect as well. In some jails in the country, solar power has been used to good effect,” sources added.
(Sources)