Hany Babu entered Navi Mumbai’s Taloja prison in July 2020. Anand Teltumbde followed the same year. Babu spent five years inside before being released on bail; Teltumbde was released in 2022 after spending about two-and-a-half years in prison. Neither has faced trial.According to the India Justice Report 2025, undertrials now account for around 75% of India’s prison population. By the end of 2022, more than 11,000 prisoners had spent over five years in pre-trial detention, a figure that has risen steadily over the past decade.Speaking to TOI, Babu and Teltumbde described life inside the overcrowded Taloja prison: waiting for court dates that did not arrive, navigating days shaped by restricted communication with family, limited medical care and an informal prison economy that determined who lived with relative ease and who did not. Babu, an English professor at Delhi University, and Teltumbde, a scholar and writer, were both arrested in connection with the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case.Five Years InsideBabu was lodged in a barrack measuring roughly 500 sq ft, officially designed for 22 inmates. “At no point during my stay was the occupancy less than 30,” he said. “At one point, 60 prisoners were crammed into the space.”“What I missed most was the freedom to talk to family,” Babu said. “Phones, chairs, beds, even making tea the way you like or playing music. Eventually, you get used to it.”After authorities flagged misuse of phone access, inmates’ privileges were reduced from multiple calls within a 10-minute window to a single 10-minute call when their turn came, often once in 10 to 15 days. “I had to choose between calling my wife or my mother,” he said.Babu acknowledged that he and Teltumbde were treated better than most undertrials. “Prison authorities dislike negative media coverage, so they mostly left us alone,” he said. “Moreover, caste and class hierarchies of the outside world are reproduced inside prisons.”“We were privileged,” he added. “Inside jail, privilege means being given what you are due by law. Others are denied even that.”Those without such privilege, Babu said, were routinely denied even basic legal access or medical care. “Some prisoners are inside for six or seven years without ever being produced in court. Families don’t have the resources to visit, so they just rot.”Illness, Hospitals and DelayIn May 2021, Babu developed a severe eye infection. “I thought I would die there,” he said. According to him, prison authorities initially dismissed the problem. The prison doctor was an Ayurvedic practitioner, not authorised to prescribe allopathic medicine. Only after his condition worsened was Babu taken to Vashi Civil Hospital as an outpatient.“When the antibiotics didn’t work, the authorities refused to take me back, insisting I complete the course,” he said. He was eventually moved to JJ Hospital, but only after his wife, Delhi University professor Jenny Rowena, approached the Bombay high court seeking urgent medical care. “The doctor told me that any further delay would have spread the infection to my brain,” Babu said.Medical care inside prisons, he added, was “rock bottom”. “No one dies in jail,” Babu said. “They die on the way to hospital.”Discipline and WaitingBabu described routine collective punishment, a practice permitted under jail manuals. When one inmate misused a facility, it was withdrawn for all.Babu said he used to believe he was not “important enough” to be incarcerated. He was wrong.Prison, Power and Adaptation“The worst deprivation was communication,” Teltumbde said. “It was especially bad during the Covid pandemic, when even newspapers stopped coming.” Access to phones, he said, was tightly controlled in ways that felt deliberately punitive.“When it was your turn to make a call, you would be marched to the telephone room, though physical telephones in jail have long been replaced by cellphones,” Teltumbde said. “People would wait in the sun till it was their turn to go in. There is no need for such absolute sadism.” He argued that the restrictions were unnecessary and easily solvable. “If jail officials wanted, they could assign one cellphone for a few barracks. It would be easier to manage,” he said. “Instead of 10 minutes, inmates could get 20-25 minutes. But they won’t do it.”When he was first confined, Teltumbde recalled, he neither ate nor drank for three days. “Then they moved me to a private cell. I slept, ate, and told myself I could survive this. When I got Covid, I thought I would die, but I survived that too.”“Humans adapt,” he said.On being released on bail, Teltumbde remarked that he was being “moved from a small jail to a big jail”, reflecting a scepticism about freedom beyond prison walls.In his 2025 prison memoir ‘Cell and the Soul’, Teltumbde wrote about what he described as a “humanitarian ethic” inside prisons: sharing whatever little one has. Prison, he observed, forces a form of communal living. At the same time, he argued, it also mirrors the outside world. Prison, Teltumbde said, is a “plutocracy”, where money determines access, comfort and influence. Wealthier inmates bypass canteen limits and build power by distributing goods, reinforcing hierarchies rather than dismantling them.Before incarceration, he had assumed his stature would protect him. It did not.
