CHRI’s Comment: Every prison in the country is required to be inspected or ‘visited’. Regular visits are mandated by law and visitors include magistrates and judges, human rights commissions, officers from public works, medical and health, social welfare departments and respected people drawn from local society. They can make individual and collective visits, surprise and scheduled visits to listen to prisoners’ grievances, identify areas of concern, and seek resolution of problems. Board of Visitors made up of local officials and folks drawn from the area are required to come together to make reports and monitor improvements. CHRI’s recent report ‘Looking Into The Haze: A National Study on Monitoring of Jails in India’ to be released on 8th November shows that across India Boards of Visitors are rarely operational, where they are they do not meet at all regularly, do not fulfil mandates nor report back to the jail department as they should, non-official visitors are not appointed in most states and visits when they take place are limited to charitable distributions on formal occasions like Diwali or Republic Day where there is little opportunity to transact the business of inspection with any seriousness. The NCRB data segregates inspections to categories of inspections by’ Medical’, ‘Executive’, ‘Judicial’ and ‘Other’ inspections. The average of two visits a month may appear reasonable but it is not clear whether every prison benefitted from two visits each month. Given CHRI’s findings this regularity is very doubtful. As is the efficacy of visits. Prison wise data that indicates the periodicity of visits and whether Boards have been constituted and non-official visitors appointed would assist in defining the quality of inspections, or indicate what was seen and heard, what was recommended for improvement and followed up on. So poor is the oversight of prisons that the Supreme Court has taken on to itself the task of monitoring prisons through the judiciary as well as monitoring and directing the rectification of the system through an on-going case aptly named “ Inhuman Conditions in 1382 Prisons’ The NCRB does not provide any useful insight due to amorphous classification of data into vague heads of ‘Medical, ‘Executive’, ‘Judicial’ and ‘Other’ inspections. Even from the little data that is provided, it is visible that on average an Indian prison was visited only twice every month in 2015 – that is after we assume that all prisons were visited. Although, the total number of inspections have increased, what is more important is that the monthly inspection rate remains the same since 2005. CHRI has been advocating for the implementation of the statutory requirement of the constitution of Board of Visitors (BOV) in every jail for effective prison monitoring.