Bhondsi redemption: Murder convict puts jail in hi-tech age

GURGAON: A murder convict in Gurgaon’s Bhondsi jail has developed a software for tracking and managing staff in a prison that houses about 50 gangsters from Haryana

GURGAON: A murder convict in Gurgaon’s Bhondsi jail has developed a software for tracking and managing staff in a prison that houses about 50 gangsters from Haryana and the national capital region, which includes New Delhi.

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Rohit Pagare, serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, came up with Staff Tracking and Accountability Management Program (STAMP) that keeps track of 200 employees in the jail.

The software gives staff duty reports and their location history in a single click.

An integrated prison map provides a status report of the staff and accurate details about exposed locations, late arrivals and early departures.

Pagare, who has spent nine years in the jail, gathered a team of prisoners for assembling the modules and motivated them to work together.

“It took four months to design and develop the

software and we worked continuously for around nine hours a day to complete the task. Finally in February, this software was put on trial in Bhondsi jail,” the 36-year-old said.

This is not the first time Pagare has worked on such a project. In 2015, he was part of a team of inmates that designed a software for prisoner management that is being used by jails across Haryana.

“It was not easy for me. Being a chartered accountant, I had little knowledge about developing software. I took it as a challenge and wanted to do something creative in the prison. So I learned and spent more than 12 hours initially to learn and work on the project.”

Pagare has also written a 368-page novel, titled Four Friends.

The need for STAMP was felt as the National Informatics Centre-based attendance system was found to be inadequate for the prison where the staff works round-the-clock.

The NIC software did not have duty allocation system and couldn’t report exposed locations — a primary requirement for any prison.

Officials said Pagare’s software has improved their efficiency level by 10-15% during the six-month trials.

“We found it extremely useful in augmenting security and improving staff efficiency. By the end of June 2017, we plan to implement this software in all prisons of Haryana,” jail superintendent Harinder Singh said.

The LAN-based software, which has upgrades for internet reporting, displays the beat point to the staff the moment he marks his attendance, thus removing human subjectivity in location distribution.

It is equipped with features like user-configurable prison map, salary support, a search engine, graphical displays and leave management system.

The software will be scaled up to include streaming from IP surveillance cameras, face detection and identification, guard patrolling systems, and RFID monitoring.

Singh said the Haryana prisons department has a salary budget of about `150 crore a year. The successful efficiency improvements at Bhondsi because of the software would earn a profit of between `16 and `25 crore for the department every year.

Pagare’s software can also be customised for other departments.

He is serving a sentence for smothering his wife to death in December 2007 in his flat in Sushant Lok-I. He hid her corpse for several hours in the house before stashing it in a suitcase, putting it in the car boot and driving around the city all day long.

The Shri Ram College of Commerce alumni then dumped the suitcase in the bushes around 100 metres from his house. Scratch marks on his hand made police suspicious and he was arrested two days later.