Ankit, 24, has been in Tihar jail for six years although his alleged crime carries a sentence of three months’ imprisonment.

A resident of Haryana, he was arrested in 2020 in Faridabad on the charge of stealing ₹1,000. He was granted bail after one and a half years of his arrest, but he did not have the ₹10,000 in property needed for a bail bond and was forced to remain in judicial custody. Police said his family could not be located.

Rahman, 30, a murder accused, has already spent eight years in Tihar as an undertrial. There are nearly 100 witnesses and so far only 20 have been examined. At this rate, the case could drag on for another decade.

More than 77 per cent of Tihar's 18,000 inmates are undertrials and many of them have spent more than five years without their trial having begun, sources at Asia’s biggest prison said.

According to an internal report by the prison authorities, many are victims of prolonged trials. In several cases, they are accused of bailable offences but have remained in jail because no legal aid has been provided to them. Many others continue to be at Tihar despite
being granted bail because they are too poor to afford the surety amounts.

Sources in the prison said some of the undertrial prisoners had been behind bars for as many as 5, 7 or 9 years and a few of them even more than 10 years, without their trial having begun. Many others are victims of prolonged trials.

“It speaks volumes about the plight of undertrials and our flawed criminal justice system. They have been denied trial for so many years and have been languishing in jail, as they are too poor to afford bail. The courts have no time for them,” a former director-general of Tihar jail told The Telegraph.

Criminal lawyer M.S. Khan said these undertrials were victims of a class-bias system and cited how rich people get bail for heinous offences, but the same facility was not available for the poor undertrials.

A Tihar jail warden said the number of undertrials has been on the rise mainly because of a massive backlog of pending cases, slow judicial proceedings, and the inability of poor, marginalised inmates to afford bail bonds.