Day Ten: Navigating between advocacy work and fact-finding work

As mentioned earlier, the team is also assisting our NGO partner with some advocacy work related to a case before the Chennai High Court involving a large pharmaceutical company. The petitioner in the case is making a trip to Davos, Switzerland to address a number of grassroots activists during the World Economic Forum. Two members of our team met with the CEO and Founder of the petitioning organization, to draft a press release and talking points in the likely event that media will cover the address. In collaboration with our NGO partner, our team was careful not to detail anything about the merits of the case, as it is in violation of Indian law to speculate about the hearing if one is chief counsel or the petitioner.

We formulated a plan to release the press release on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, immediately prior to the petitioner’s address in Davos. We also made a commitment to produce a series of talking points for all of our partner NGO’s offices, as well as draft an op-ed piece, with the intention of placing it in a major publication.

Meanwhile, the other members of our team continued to firm up meetings with organizations and stakeholders working within India’s prisons, or on behalf of former or current inmates. The team scheduled meetings with a theater group that goes inside the prisons to provide art classes (theater, painting, etc.) for prisoners, and solidified meetings for a Thursday trip to Pune, which is about a two-hour drive from Mumbai (sans traffic). We all reconnected at 4pm to drive back to the Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS), where we were to meet with the head of a social work initiative housed at the university that works on prisoner rehabilitation.

At TISS, the head of the initiative gave a sound overview of the services they provide to prisons in Mumbai (and throughout Maharashtra State). They focus on the individual, often involving a prisoner’s family in their rehabilitation. Rehabilitation includes arranging for education, training, and helping with medical services for those addicted to drugs, among other programs the initiative runs. Among the education programs at the initiative include a program to train prisoners to become paralegals, as well as a program to train them to work in the NGO sector once they are released.

Because they work very closely with prison authorities and officials within India’s criminal justice system, the director was unwilling to comment on any conditions faced by prisoners, other than to say that overcrowding was an obvious issue inside India’s prisons. But the initiative has given workshops in collaboration with India’s National Human Rights Commission, and will sometimes participate in policy discussions if requested (the director cited an example where the Bombay High Court asked the initiative to weigh in with their thoughts on improving the visitation system for families of prisoners).

At the end of our meeting, the director gave us several leads (including a public health professional, as well as a literacy group that works within prisons in Maharashtra State) to follow up on, and suggested the solution to any problems concerning India’s prisons center around a lack of political will, and a need for NGOs and activists to meet prison officials to discuss their concerns.