Mumbai, June 23: A 30-year-old prisoner, whose petition in the Bombay high court had highlighted the lack of medical treatment for HIV-positive inmates in Maharashtra’s jails, has died of Aids at Pune’s Yerwada prison.
His application had prompted the HC to set up a committee to look into the lack of medical facilities for HIV-positive prisoners.
And, on Monday, when the petitioner’s lawyer Rajesh Bindra told the court that his client (name withheld) had died, the HC set up another committee to look into why HIV-positive prisoners were dying in jails. The committee, to be headed by inspector-general of prisons, has to submit its report in two weeks.
Bindra had earlier argued in court that as many as 32 HIV-positive inmates had died in the Yerwada jail between 2001 and 2006. His client, sentenced to life, died in March and another HIV-positive prisoner died in April, he said.
Bindra’s client had alleged that jail officials were flouting National Aids Control Organisation (Naco) guidelines on taking HIV-positive prisoners to Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) centres on a timely basis.
The petition said that denial of treatment to prisoners suffering from life-threatening conditions, like being HIV-positive, was a violation of their fundamental rights. Bindra had sought his client’s release on bail to enable him to get proper treatment. While the HC took up the petition on lack of treatment for HIV-positives, it kept the bail application pending.
In January, the HC had directed the Maharashtra State AIDS Control Society to conduct a voluntary HIV-testing programme in four jails across the state.
Earlier, the HC had sought the assistance of lawyers Yug Chowdhary and Anand Grover in improving facilities in jails for HIV-positive prisoners. They had suggested that if the number of HIV prisoners was high then authorities could consider having ART centres within prisons. Chowdhary said on Monday that despite recommendations, sanctioned posts of medical officers in jails were not being filled up.
Last July, the Nagpur bench of the HC had said that prison authorities should consider putting all undertrials and convicts through an HIV test. This was in response to a letter by a rape convict who alleged that he became HIV-positive during his stay in jail as the “barber in the jail shaves several inmates with the same blade”.
—Agencies–