Top Stories

For the first time in Delhi Police history, a woman now occupies the pivotal position of Special Commissioner Police (Admin.), with Vimla Mehra, a 1978 batch IPS officer of the Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre, who until recently was DG Delhi Prisons, assuming the Numero Duo role within the Delhi Police hierarchy. Prior to taking over the reins of Tihar Jail, she was DGP Arunachal Pradesh, before which she has served the Delhi Police earlier in various capacities as well. Her coming back to Delhi Police will ring the right bell with those who have rooted for a woman officer at the helm after the nirbhaya episode. As the head of administration of one of India’s elite police forces, Vimla Mehra will be managing many issues that can impact on the safety and security of the fairer sex in the national Capital. As DG Prisons, she is reputed to have ushered in welcome changes in making Tihar more humane and prisoner-friendly, building proactively upon the path-breaking work started by one of her predecessors, Kiran Bedi, the first woman IPS officer in the country to head Tihar. NRI Achievers spent quality time with the lady, and bring you her profile, and her thoughts on the sensitive management of a penitentiary institution…

Vimla Mehra is yet another new beacon of hope for many a girl who aspires to step into roles dominantly monopolised by men in India. Her words when she took over as the DG Prisons: “My focus would be to build upon the good work done by my predecessors. I plan to start more vocational programmes to equip inmates with employment- oriented skills which will give them confidence to face the outside world after their release,” she averred. And then as DG Tihar, she did introduce some innovative vocational programmes to train inmates in employmentoriented skills. Another significant change wrought by her was the introduction of foreign language courses for woman inmates and undertrials. Prior to her Tihar assignment, as the head of Crime against Women cell, she is to be credited with being instrumental in launching a dedicated helpline (1091) for women. She is also the one who kickstarted self-defence training programmes for women, and it was during her tenure that woman police officers were made Investigating Officers (IOs) in all cases involving women. She recalls her first posting to Delhi was in 1984, just before the anti-Sikh riots: “I was commanding a training battalion at that time, and when the riots broke out, we all were put on duty.” In the next few months, she became part of Delhi Police security unit as a special commissioner. According to Mehra, those years were ‘a dark period,’ but despite the horrors of those times, she sees them today in retrospect as days which taught her an immense lot about policing, and serve as lessons in handling crimes delicately and sensitively. For Vimla Mehra, running one of the world’s largest prison complexes was akin to managing an extra large household. “Women obviously can do it better, as it is but an application of the natural work we do at home.” quipped Ms. Mehra, when asked about her perspective on managing Tihar Jail. The 58-year-old divorcee and mother was but the second female director general of Delhi’s Tihar Prison after Kiran Bedi, the first woman to head the prison, stood down in 1995 after two years in the role.

Since then, Tihar, already home to some of India’s most famous, or infamous, prisoners, has housed people like the perpetrators of the Delhi gang rape case that led to the death of a 23-year-old woman in December, prompting protest and outrage across the world. A ‘motherly instinct’ does help in interacting with prisoners on an emotional level, but it also made it difficult for her to be associated with suspects accused of such brutality, according to Ms. Mehra. “I was really distressed by what had happened to the young woman,” she said. “I was connected with the case because the suspects are with me [in Tihar] and it was very disturbing mentally.” Vimla Mehra was 22 when she joined the police in 1978, the only woman in her batch of 58 recruits. She says she ‘couldn’t climb the ropes’ during physical training at the gym, but was able to do everything else her male counterparts did. Her motivation for joining the force was to be able to support herself. “I wanted to be financially independent and prove that I was capable of doing something special,” she said. As a child, Vimla, the middle child amoung seven siblings, says she was allowed to study instead of help with household chores. “Though there was a lot of work to do at home, I was never forced to do that,” she said. “My father created an atmosphere for all of us — particularly me — to study and he was the one who spotted my potential,” she said. Vimla Mehra’s mother had passed away soon after her birth, and she grew up with her father and stepmother.

On joining the police as an assistant superintendent after clearing the civil service exams, she was posted to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. Her first big case was a homicide, involving the death of a man who had been shot through the head with an arrow. She returned to Delhi in 1984 just as anti-Sikh riots broke out in the city. Her battalion was put in charge of dealing with the dead bodies. “That was the first big professional experience of my life, commanding a battalion,” she said. “People were so violent.” Ms. Mehra’s next posting was to the crimes against women cell, where she introduced the first ever self-defense training courses for women run by the police. “We have hands and fingers which we can use effectively to push an assaulter away,” Ms. Mehra says. “We can use a scarf or pen or whatever we have in our hands. So we encouraged women to try and think about using them, considering we do tend to carry so much potential weaponry on our person.” The NRI Achievers editorial team spoke to Vimla Mehra on a whole plethora of issues, which made the canvas pretty panoramic. While many a subject matter discussed with her could form the content of another feature to come in the future, we have chosen to stick to the theme of making jails humane, and bring our readers here some telling thoughts in the form of excerpts from the long conversations we had with Vimla Mehra, on managing one of India’s largest penitentiary establishments, the Tihar Jail, more of less in her own words …

“In Tihar, we have an inmate population of over 14,000 people, out of whom convicts form a mere 25% or less, and undertrials are of the order of 75% or more. I would say that this is one of the adverse reflections and aspects of our present judicial system. And after the Nirbhaya incident, we have seen a trend that manifests itself as an increase in population of undertrials in jails … “As administrators we are concerned with problems this sort of a population profile in jails spawns, and we have been talking about these issues at various fora and at various levels in government and the judiciary, but there hasn’t been really much that’s been done about it. Reform, in my view, is the only way by which we can address such systemic issues and problems, and that needs time. A lot of time. So I guess that while we are all taking steps in isolation, the big picture change will come slowly when it expands to include coordination.

In the interim, I asked myself, what best can we do ? The best we as jail administrators can do is to usher in and institute changes in the way in which we run our own establishments, in the hope that others across the country in different states, will emulate us … “The purpose of every action I had taken so far has been with the explicit goal of making the jail a more humane place for the inmates, be they convicts or undertrials. Both categories of prisioners lodged in the jail need a fundamentally different approach, which in at least a small way, will contribute toward the reform of their character, their world-view and life-imperatives. With that in mind, we had crafted initiatives to bring about positive change in the here-and-now of the prisioners’ lives, for as long as they with us… “Take our convict population. Some will spend 10 years here, some 14, and some their entire lives. Now, what can we do to ensure that these convicts can be useful citizens and be accepted by society on their release, able to eke out a livelihood for themselves once they are out, instead of getting mired into the endless spiral of a vicious circle that will once again push them into crime ? After all, the altruistic object of all jails is to serve as corrective institutions and reform the people who come within their system …

“To transform that vicious circle into a virtuous one, we found some answers in vocational training with focus on employmentoriented skills, opening up higher education possibilities – there is an IGNOU centre in every jail within Tihar, many are qualifying from these with flying colours. One of our inmates has even cleared the civil services exams with flying colours. The various production centres that dot the jail landscape in Tihar are all beehives of activity, with many quality goods being produced … from garments to wooden furniture to footwear to edibles and victuals … Tihar branded bakery products are comparable to the best available in the Delhi markets. “Samay ka sadupyog” – today, everyone in Tihar is working on this, and this has brought much good … some wages, self-respect et al for the inmates, something more constructive and ‘social’ to do for the jail staff, so they are happy doing this, some money comes in and a lot of good work is done … inmates are happier as they earn, time passes more peacefully. The production that ensues accrues some benefit for all, the inmates, the staff, and the government as well … the scheme “Padho Padhao” is another good initiative that has shown desirable results … four years ago, the jail population on average was 40% illiterate, but today all the people are literate thanks to this intervention. Thus, building upon all the good work done in the past by my predecessors, I and the team I have had the privelige to work with in Tihar, have tried to do our mite in making the milieu a little bit better than it already was…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *