The Maharashtra government informed the Bombay High Court that it has decided to increase the financial assistance given to women convicts after their release from prison from Rs. 5000 to Rs. 25,000.
This was conveyed by state government counsel Hiten Venegaonkar to a bench headed by Justice V M Kanade during the hearing of a suo motu petition seeking help to women convicts who have children.
The HC had suo motu taken note of a media report and converted it into a petition which is being heard from time to time.
The issue involved was that when the mother was in jail after conviction in a case what would happen to her child outside and whether the kid would go to school or suffer due to lack of education.
The petition was based on a news report in which various suggestions were made by Prayas, an NGO, on women prisoners who have children. It said that some kids are in prison along with their mothers while in few other cases the children remain outside jail and yet in other cases they are confined to juvenile homes.
It also focussed on their educational needs and on requirements to make them independent while their mothers are serving jail terms.
The HC also clubbed the issue of children of women prisoners along with the street children and wanted to know how many such children existed as of now.
The bench directed the government pleader to place on record on October 17 the number of children of women convicts so that it could ask the government to take care of their education, livelihood and other needs.
Rebecca Gonsalves, who appeared for Maharashtra State Legal Aid Authority, was also directed to list out measures that can be taken for the welfare of such children.
Venegaonkar said the amount of financial assistance had been increased recently from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 25,000 which is given as a lumpsum amount to a woman convict to start a new life after serving sentence.
He also said that 158 women were at present serving sentence in various jails of Maharashtra.
