Bottleneck removed: Jails in Sindh get go ahead for installing jammers

Ministry of information technology and telecom finally issues NOC.

KARACHI:

The long standing demand to have jammers installed in jails across the province finally made headway as the required No Objection Certificate (NOC) came through from the federal ministry of information technology and telecom.

“We finally received the permission from the ministry,” said Additional Chief Secretary Home Waseem Ahmed. “Now jammers will, however, be installed in every prison of Sindh after budget is allocated for it.”

Sindh IG Prisons Ghulam Qadir Thebo said that he was relieved that progress was made and now they were only waiting for the funds to be released to install them. He said that Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah promised that funds will be released soon when he visited the central jail on Friday.

Even though many high-profile criminals and terrorists languished in 26 jails across Sindh, the permission was stalled because of a bottleneck at an inter-ministerial committee, headed by the federal secretary of IT&T, in Islamabad.

The prison and police officials admitted that smuggling of mobile phones was rampant in jails despite best efforts to curb the practice. They argued that the best and perhaps the only way to deal with the problem was to have jammers installed, at least in the prisons with high-profile inmates.

In fact, in one instance, India and Pakistan nearly went to war because of a phone call made from a prison in Sindh. In November 2008, a notorious terrorist, Omar Saeed Shiekh, placed hoax calls to President Asif Ali Zardari and Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, from a jail in Hyderabad. Shiekh pretended to be the Indian foreign minister and threatened to wage war on Pakistan in retaliation of the Mumbai attacks, using a smuggled British SIM and cell phone.

However, even though the budgets for provincial prisons set aside money for the installation of mobile phone jammers in the past, the funds were allowed to lapse because the NOC never came through despite repeated requests by jail authorities.

In the first phase, the jammers will be installed at seven central jails of the province, including Karachi. Thebo said he required around Rs30 million to achieve it on a priority basis. He said he planned to install jammers in 11 district jails in the second phase. About juvenile jails he said that the situation there was under control and he didn’t think jammers were required there.

This, however, does not mean that the prisoners will be deprived of making phone calls to their families.  According to the chief minister, Qaim Ali Shah, the use of unauthorised mobile phones increased the crime rate and that is why they were banned. He added that using unauthorized mobile phones was banned in prisons and phone jammers were being installed to ensure that they were not used. The chief minister was given a tour of the prison facilities including the prisoners’ art school.

Shah inaugurated a public call office and Nadra’s mobile service for computerized national identity cards at Central Jail Karachi. He said the government will also provide better health, education, computer literacy and cultural facilities to the prisoners under special reformation programmes. Many prison sentences were reduced by two months in memory of Benazir Bhutto.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th, 2011.