CM to inaugurate Baruipur Central Correctional Home on Wednesday

Kolkata: The Baruipur Central Correctional Home will be inaugurated by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee by remote control from Nabanna on Wednesday, November 14. The state government will initially shift 700 inmates from Alipore Central Correctional Home (ACCH) to Baruipur and will gradually shift all those lodged in ACCH phase-wise.

A senior official of the state Correctional Administration department said that the Baruipur Central Correctional Home (BCCH) has the capacity to house as many as 4,000 inmates. State Correctional Administration minister Ujjal Biswas, Speaker of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly Biman Banerjee and senior officials of the Correctional Administration (CA) department will be present at the inaugural programme at Dhopagachi in Baruipur, where the facility has come up.

"We have given special emphasis on security at BCCH and have taken all possible measures for foolproof security mechanism," said Ujjal Biswas, minister of state, CA department.

Among the 700 inmates who will be shifted in the first phase, 200 are convicts and 500 are under-trials.

The Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) has completed the entire work for the infrastructure of BCCH that includes drinking water, drainage, lighting and most importantly, the approach road leading to the correctional home.

"Truckloads of construction material was brought for construction work of the prison through the approach road, which resulted in extremely poor condition of the roads. Sprucing up the road was a tough ask and our engineers worked on a war footing to repair the road," said a senior official of KMDA.

The present accommodation capacity of the 112-year-old ACCH is 1,900. But there are above 2,200 inmates at present. In the correctional home, there are many cells which are of immense historical importance and according to an official of the correctional home, those are now heritage sites. There are around 30 heritage cells.

There is a single-storeyed building in which Jawaharlal Nehru was imprisoned by the British for three to four months in 1934. There is another two-storeyed heritage building with ten lockups in each floor, where freedom fighters, including Chittaranjan Das, Jatindra Mohan Sengupta, Bidhan Chandra Roy and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose were imprisoned in the 1930s.