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  In a soup: Lalu Prasad

Former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad's friends are dropping by to visit him in a Ranchi jail, carrying baskets of food. In another corner of the country, a former minister is allegedly losing weight. The food she gets in jail is not good enough, relatives of Maya Kodnani claim.

When India's high and mighty are jailed, their comforts, it seems, cannot be overlooked. In 1997, when Lalu was last in jail in a case relating to a multi-crore rupee scam, he was accompanied by Johnny Walker whisky and kebabs. Even now, the former rail minister, sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday, is entitled to quite a feast every day by virtue of being an A-class prisoner at the circular Birsa Munda Central Prison.

The ordinary prison doesn't have it this good. At Yerawada men's jail in Pune — one of Maharashtra's eight central jails — bhai log (gangsters) fry bland prison dal in hair oil on a tripod of bricks and ignited dried rotis. But those who can bribe the servers — all convicts — with Rs 1,500-2,000 a month are assured of larger helpings, says Madhav (not his real name), recently released on bail from Yerawada.

Prisoners can complain to the jail superintendent if the food does not conform to the prison manual diet chart, which spells out what an inmate is entitled to (for instance, 85 grams of jaggery and 5 grams of onion every day) — but at the risk of a sound thrashing once he turns his back, Madhav adds.

In Maharashtra's prisons, meat remains a bone of contention and can be bought from the jail canteen only on a few festive days. In 2009, the Bombay High Court, aghast at the Maharashtra government's suggestion that meat was likely to 'flare tempers' and create a 'riot-like' situation in prison, directed it to put non-vegetarian food on the canteen menu once a week and serve eggs for breakfast daily. This was in response to a petition filed by a 1993 serial blast accused, Sardar Shahwali Khan, challenging the ban on non- vegetarian food in the jail canteen.

A fortnight before a festival, a list from the jail canteen is circulated among inmates at Yerawada. A kilo of curried chicken — hardly 40 per cent is meat — costs Rs 90. Foreigners, mostly drug crime serving Africans, are entitled to meatier and mildly spiced chicken described with a racist slur as @#$% chicken, which the bhai log buy in bulk in the name of other inmates and stash away for a rainy day. Refusing the bhai log would expose one to beatings, sleeping outside the toilet and washing undergarments.

Because of the unsavoury reputation of jail food, efforts are on to portray a rosy picture. State prisons have begun posting weekly menus on their websites: Kerala serves fish curry bi-weekly and mutton curry weekly; Karnataka serves 'boneless' mutton once a week. The Bishnupur 'correctional centre' ladles out 75 grams of meat or fish a week.

Jammu and Kashmir serves mutton twice a week, spending Rs 50-55 a day on an inmate's food, the state's inspector-general of prisons, Rajendra Kumar, says. Bihar spends a paltry Rs 39 a day.

But money is never a constraint in the jail kitchen, western Maharashtra's former DIG (prisons), M.K. Karve, holds.

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  Birsa Munda Central Jail, Ranchi

The National Crime Research Bureau in its 2011-12 report shows that 61.1 per cent of the country's prison budget was spent on food. Uttar Pradesh was the biggest spender, with an annual food budget of Rs 8,778.8 lakh. West Bengal (Rs 2,986.8 lakh), Bihar (Rs 2,845.6 lakh) and Maharashtra (Rs 2,742.9 lakh) ranked among the more modest spenders.

'Jail food can be as good or bad as jail authorities want it to be,' Sanjiv Bhatt, Gujarat's IPS officer suspended by the Narendra Modi government, stresses. Ironically, in 2011 Bhatt was incarcerated in the same Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad which had seen radical reforms during his three-month stint as superintendent in 2003.

To come up with tastier bites, Bhatt and the Sabarmati mess committee mixed and matched. 'By saving up a few days' quota of milk or ghee we churned out kheer at festivals, and sheera (suji) or upma on regular days,' Bhatt says. 'For breakfast we baked buns that even city folk didn't get so fresh.'

Five years ago, agitating prisoners forced Karnataka to drop its standard uppittu (upma) breakfast for beaten rice, lemon rice, vegetable rice and tamarind rice. But some states still stick to boring old norms. Kerala, for instance, serves only tea, chapati and chutney.

The country's model prison manual, drafted by the bureau of police research and development in 2003, encourages states to modify menus to suit lifestyles and climes, spice up daily fare, and dish out special food at festivals and even on days of fasting.

'But the jail manual is not written in stone and we change it from time to time,' P.C. Thakur, Gujarat's inspector-general of prisons, states. Gupta got members of an ashram in Saurashtra to teach the state's prisons how to roll out softer rotis. 'Earlier, inmates used to throw their rotis; now the rotis stay fresh till the evening,' Thakur says.

But in Delhi's Tihar Jail, this version of jailhouse rock was back not long after Kiran Bedi thought she had banished it from the jail kitchen that had first greeted her — the prison's newly appointed IG in 1993 — with mosquito and fly garnished curries.

Kashmiri political activist Anjum Zamarud Habib is yet to regain her appetite after almost five years of Tihar fare: watery dal, maggot and stone garnished rice and leathery rotis that she mentions in her book Prisoner No. 100. 'Not everybody could afford the slightly better canteen food,' she says.

But the authorities have their hands tied by state rules, Bihar's IG (prisons) Anand Kishore maintains. 'Private contractors quote unreasonably low rates and we have to go for the lowest bidder,' he says.

In the bargain, lives could be lost, as Goa's Aguada Central Prison witnessed. After dinner on May 31, over 100 inmates complained of vomiting and diarrhoea. An inmate, Mahadev Gaonkar, died the next morning, a little more than a month before his release.

A 175-page magisterial report led to the transfer of four jail authorities and made note of the sad state of the jail kitchen which was 'not so clean' and that hygiene was 'compromised', Goa's inspector-general of prisons, Mihir Vardhan, admits.

Prison manuals across the country mandate a 'modern' kitchen with sufficient dining space, adequate drinking water, ventilation and light, with fly-proof doors that shut automatically. But Bedi points out that cooking is a part of 'rigorous labour' and can be 'punishing'.

A few prisons have found the answer in outsourcing. Since May 2007, Karnataka's sambar and buttermilk meals have been dished out by the Akshaya Patra Foundation.

Employ full-time cooks, suggests the All India Jail Reforms Committee in its 2003 report. Not that anybody's listening. And those who can make a difference are anyway busy with their meat curries in jail.