In 2025, the country is still engaged in political debate regarding bail reform, while jails and prisons swell with people who have not been found guilty of a crime. The NCRB declared it “overcrowding.” However, rights defenders saw something much broader, which was the institutionalization of inequality. For the world’s largest democracy, wealth as a means of obtaining freedom is possible, but liberty is now a luxury.

While the NCRB 2023 report did provide numbers/data, it did not diagnose the primary reason for so many Indians who were jailed prior to a trial taking place. It did not address or ask why the poor and the marginal are consistently at the top of these tables, or why, year after year, freedom is deferrable by caste, class, and faith.

The Undertrial Nation

According to data from the 2023 NCRB, Muslims make up 16.5% of the overall prison population, an overrepresentation that continues despite numerous demands that this be revisited. Two years later, there remain 16.5% of Muslim prisoners, but the politics surrounding that number has hardened.

Faith-based profiling is no longer the subject of accusations; it is a quiet cynically accepted, administrative process. Detentions under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the National Security Act (NSA) continue to be unevenly applied to Muslim men, particularly in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. However, the NCRB report for 2023 claims there is only one UAPA case in Maharashtra—even if the claim is absurd, there still continue to be ongoing prosecutions on UAPA grounds from Bhima Koregaon to the anti-CAA protests in Delhi.

The reasoning behind this invisibility was brutally exposed in Javed Ahmad Hajam v. State of Maharashtra. Hajam, a college professor from Kolhapur, posted two WhatsApp status updates in August 2022, one that said August 5 was “Jammu and Kashmir Black Day” and another that said “Happy Independence Day Pakistan” for August 14, which led to an FIR under Section 153A IPC (promoting enmity).

Ultimately, the Supreme Court quashed the prosecution, holding, in context, that the posts were political dissent, and that the malignity needed to bring Section 153A to bear was absent. In framing its position, the Court used a “reasonable person” test, held that dissent cannot become criminal, and that Section 153A cannot arbitrarily hush criticism.

The judgment even expressed concern of an institutional dimension to the whole inquiry – the way vague statutory language and untrained policing convert speech into a pathway to detainment. The case matters here because it illustrates this immediacy of the carceral leap: a single FIR, typically framed as ‘communal’ is potential for arrest, then detained (which can last indefinitely), and an undertrial is then captured as a unique entry status backed into an undeterred victimized group in yearly NCRB tables – but without record of the chilling context the data point entries rely on.

Caste, Community, and Architecture of Incarceration

If the data of 2023 offered a snapshot of social disparity, 2025 is telling us how deeply rooted that disparity is. Dalits still comprise more than one-fifth of India’s prisoners, Adivasis make up close to one-eighth and Muslims about one in six – these numbers have barely budged, nor has official concern.

The NCRB’s lack of willingness to make claims about any overrepresentations is simply political silence repackaged as bureaucratic neutrality. To them, these disparities are naturally occurring, which they are not. From police profiling to the refusal of bail, the criminal justice pipeline re-generates, with unsettling accuracy, India’s social order. Sociologist Harsh Mander once called Indian prisons “the moral underside of democracy”. By 2025, that description feels literal. The undertrial prisoner, mostly poor and caste-characterized, remains India’s longest-term prisoner.

Walled in, the caste labour persists. Dalit and Adivasi prisoners still carry out daily cleaning, cooking, and sanitation duties – caste work that replicates caste labour outside of prison. Freedom, as this data shows, is not evenly distributed, and neither is labour.

Faith Behind Bars

Faith-based profiling is no longer an accusation; it is well-established as an open secret. As with the speculative basis for immediate detention and discredited action, Muslim men are disproportionately subjected to both the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and preventive provisions of the National Security Act (NSA), particularly in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi.

India’s jails have become a reflection of its hierarchies rather than a place of justice. In Prison Statistics India 2023, India has 5.8 lakh prisoners, of which 77.9% (≈ 4.5 lakh prisoners) are un-convicted, which is the highest proportion in over a decade. Overcrowding was reported at 133% of capacity on a national level, mostly in jails of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Behind the numbers is a familiar trend: Dalits at 22% of all prisoners, Adivasis at 13%, and Muslims at 16% of all prisoners, which is all considerably higher than their percentage of the population in India. The tables in the NCRB’s report list out these categories without any comment, presenting social injustices as administrative facts. By refusing to analyse factors surrounding why certain groups have disproportionately higher rates of representation in the prison system, the state legitimizes exclusion by normalising systemic inequality into statistical fact, reported The NEWS Minute.

Discrimination is not only seen in prison numbers, but also in parole and the speediness of trials. Baba Ram Rahim, who is a convicted murderer and rapist, was granted parole a staggering 14 times, from October 2020 to August 2025, with three terms being in 2025 itself. In contrast, Umar Khalid, who is an activist, has been in jail for five years without trial, and his bail has been denied multiple times under the pretext of “threat to national security.”

In flattening faith into numbers, the NCRB reduces prejudice to neutrality. The state of the prison, like the data, either becomes a place of discrimination in plain sight.

Women, Gender, and the Data of Absence

Women made up 4.3% of prisoners in the NCRB’s 2023 data – enough of a smidgeon that it could begin to be ignored. But, as reports from Sabrang India and the NHRC (2024) point out, their invisibility is not statistical; it is structural.

Most women’s incarceration is tied to a survival offense: theft, domestic disputes, or moral policing. Very few get access to a lawyer, healthcare, or childcare. By 2025, only 22 prisons in the country had crèches available to inmates.

Gender minorities are truly invisible. NCRB continues to count “male/female” – which leaves out transgender and non-binary prisoners. Activists are quick to inform us about the fact that data does not equal policy – no transgender cells, no hormone therapy, no protections against abuse.

The prison manual has not been updated to adjust to constitutional morality; its silences are administrative, but the reality is lived experience.

The Data of Denial

One of the more evident lessons of 2023, then, was the degree to which data can make inequality appear normative. Two years later, the lesson has only gained in strength.

The NCRB’s refusal to disaggregate incarceration data according to religion, caste or class across the bail stage and the conviction stage continues to obscure systemic bias. By counting only what fits within bureaucratic constructs, all of it can work to conceal acts of discrimination as neutrality.

The same governmental decision to stop collecting data on lynchings and hate crimes after 2017 appears again in the prison context — a continuation of silence on the part of the state. What the state does not collect, it cannot be held accountable for reporting.

In Jammu & Kashmir, where hundreds have been pre-emptively detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA) after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, the NCRB’s Crime in India 2023 – with its stunningly low figures – reported zero cases of sedition or communal violence. However, reports on the ground indicate otherwise, as do court files. Fahad Shah, the editor of Kashmir Walla, and journalist Sajjad Gul were jailed under UAPA and PSA in March 2023, despite numerous bail orders, for their articles deemed “anti-national.” In the same year, the Jammu & Kashmir Police reported under RTI, accessed by Article 14, that they had invoked PSA against 412 persons on a preventive basis. The contradiction here is not criminality versus adherence to justice but rather the moral experience of being measured: if one is not on the record, proof of adherence is sworn. The fewer crimes, the more the state can claim it has successfully imposed “peace.” What one measures is not justice but rather compliance.

The Republic Behind Bars

Looking back from 2025, India’s prisons do not seem an exception to justice, but its crucible. The state’s preoccupation with order has turned imprisonment into governance. The 77% undertrial rate isn’t about the administration of justice; it is about the exercise of power.

As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar warned, democracy in India does not rest on what we write on paper, but on how the state treats the utterly powerless; two years on from the NCRB 2023 report, the statistics continue to accuse us.

They illustrate a Republic where faith dictates remand, caste controls bail, and poverty dictates punishment. If freedom is going to mean anything, it will have to mean spilling the data. Prison reform, bail parity, and accurate evidence-based transparency reporting are not just procedural niceties; they are unfinished business from the Constitution itself.

Until then, the incarceration ledger will remain the most honest reflection of modern India — meaning a nation where justice, for far too many, begins only after imprisonment ends.

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)

Related:

Almost 2 Lakh Undertrials Languishing Behind Bars: Outbreak of COVID-19 Exposed Inequality in Indian Prisons

Data Without Justice: What NCRB’s Prison Statistics Reveal About Caste, Faith and Inequality

Who Gets Bail, Who Stays Behind Bars: A Tale of Unequal Liberty in India’s Criminal Justice System

NCRB’s Prison Statistics Report 2019 paints a bleak picture

The post Counting the Caged: What India’s prison data refuses to see appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The data also provides the ethnic division of the prisoners- Hindus constitute73.8%, Muslims 17.1%, Sikhs 4.2%, and Christians 3.3%. In under trials, 65.3% are Hindus, 19.3% Muslims, 4.7% Sikhs, and 2.5% Christians. Among detenues, Hindus represent 50.3%, Muslims 35.2%, Sikhs 0.4%, Christians 9.8%. The state of Tamil Nadu has the highest number of detainees, reported to be 2,129.

On December 13, during the ongoing winter parliamentary session, Mohamed Abdulla raised several questions regarding the gender-wise as well as the religion-wise prisoners’ ratio. Abdulla belongs to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party and is a member of the Rajya Sabha. These questions were presented to Ajay Kumar Mishra, who currently serves as the minister of state in ministry of home affairs.

When asked regarding the details about the gender-wise prisoners’ ratio, the minister presented the annexure given below.

From the above table, it can be deduced that males constitute 95.84% of the total inmates’ population in the country, whereas females and the transgender community constitute 4.15% and 0.01% respectively. The highest number of inmates are present in the prisons of Uttar Pradesh with 1,21,609 inmates and the lowest number of inmates, 6 in total, are present in Lakshadweep.

The state of Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of male and female prisoners. As per the data, a total of 1,16792 males and 4809 females are present in Uttar Pradesh. The lowest number of males, only 6, are present in Lakshadweep. The prisons of DNH & Daman Diu, Ladakh and Lakshadweep have no female inmates. The highest number of transgender prisoners, 17 in total, are present in the prisons of Maharashtra as well as West Bengal.

The following table provided the religion-wise details of the convicts lodged in jails:

From the above table, it can be observed that the Hindus make up 73.8% of the total convicts lodged in jails, followed by Muslims (17.1%), Sikhs (4.2%), Christians (3.3%) and other religions (1.6%) of the convicts lodged in jails. In the prison of Uttar Pradesh, a total of 20,063 Hindus, 550 Christians and 5,881 Muslims have been lodged, the highest amongst religion-wise population from other states. The highest number of Sikhs are present in the prisons of Punjab, with 3860 Sikh convicts. The highest number of other religions’ convicts are lodged in Maharashtra, a total of 958 convicts.

The above table provides the percentage distribution of all the religions of the under trials lodged in jails. As per the data, Hindus make up 65.3% of the total population of under trials, Muslims make up 19.3%, 4.7% Sikhs, 2.5% Christians and 0.7% other religions. It is essential to point out here that the aforementioned percentage will fully accurate as the state of Maharashtra has not provided any data on the break-up of the under trials religion-wise. As expected, the highest number of under trials are lodged in the jails of Uttar Pradesh, holding 94,131undertrails. On the other hand, the lowest number of under trials are lodged in jail of Lakshadweep with only 6 under trials.

A total of 65,789 Hindus and 26,149 Muslims, highest amongst the other states, were present in the jails of Uttar Pradesh. The highest number of under trial Sikhs, 14565 in total, are lodged in Punjab while the highest number of under trial Christians are in Tamil Nadu, a total of 1651. The prison of Uttar Pradesh also houses the highest number of other religions’ under trials, a total of 1089.

Lastly, the above table providing the percentage distribution of all the religions of the detenues lodged in jails was also provided in the response of the Union. Detenues are those people who are held in custody. The Hindus make up 50.3%, followed by Muslims at 35.2%, Christians at 9.8%, Sikhs at 0.4%, and the other religions constitute 0% of the detenues lodged in jails. Notably, since no data is present for the state of Maharashtra, the aforementioned percentages will not be fully accurate.

The statistics reveal a significant gender disparity, with males comprising 95.84% of inmates nationwide. Uttar Pradesh hosts the highest inmate count while Lakshadweep holds the lowest. Among religious groups, Hindus form the majority among convicts, under trials, and detenues, particularly prominent in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Muslims have a substantial presence in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, while Sikhs are notably concentrated in Punjab. For Christians, their highest population can be found in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. These patterns underscore regional variations and demand targeted interventions within the criminal justice system to address these disparities and ensure equitable representation and treatment across demographics.

The complete answer can be accessed here:

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The post India’s Prisons: 95.84% male population, highest number of convicts and under trials languishing in UP prisons appeared first on SabrangIndia.