Supreme Court strikes down rules promoting caste-based allocation of work in jails

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down prison manual rules that promoted caste discrimination in jails by allocating prisoners from oppressed communities to carry out menial jobs, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said that discrimination in prisons will not be tolerated and initiated a suo motu case to monitor the matter.

The order came on a petition filed by journalist Sukanya Shantha, following her investigative reporting series in The Wire on caste-based discrimination and segregation in jails. The plea highlighted that prison manuals in several states promote such discrimination.

The reporting found that the division of labour was being determined on the “‘purity-impurity’ scale, with the higher castes handling only work that is considered ‘pure’ and those lower in the caste grid being left to carry out the ‘impure’ jobs”.

The court said that prisoners from oppressed communities cannot be assigned menial, degrading or inhumane work merely because of their caste identity. It struck down the rules in the prison manuals of some states that allowed such a practice.

“We have held that assigning cleaning and sweeping to marginalised and assigning cooking to higher caste is nothing but a violation of Article 15,” the bench said. “Such indirect uses of phrases which target so-called lower castes cannot be...

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