Under the idea mooted by chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar in November 2016, the state government will use jails with surplus land as cow shelters.
Chandigarh: Haryana is soon set to join a handful states where prisoners will share jail space with cows.
While the proposal is largely driven by the need for “self-financing” cow shelters in the BJP-ruled state, it is also hoped that taking care of cows will reform convicts and under-trials.
Under the idea mooted by chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar in November 2016, the state government will use jails with surplus land as cow shelters and the cows will be cared for by jail inmates. The first such gaushala will come up inside Karnal jail by the middle of this year.
Jails in Ambala, Jind, Bhiwani, Sonepat and Rohtak are expected to follow suit.
Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat already have gaushalas on jail premises. Tihar jail in Delhi also has a cow shelter housing a dozen cows. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath is also planning to emulate Khattar although small cow sheds exist in Agra and Allahabad jails.
While the move is being laughed at as BJP ruled states opting for “cow therapy” to reform prisoners, the concept is largely driven by the need for “self-financing” cow shelters, said Haryana’s Gau Sewa Aayog chairman Bhani Ram Mangla.
“Jails have large tracts of land where wheat etc is cultivated by the prisoners. A cow shelter can easily be constructed on a bit of that space and apart from wheat, fodder for the cows can be grown,” Mangla told ThePrint.
“Each gaushala, depending on the space available, will have at least 400 abandoned and stray cows and 200 milk producing cows. Cow dung will be used to fertilise the fields inside the jail.”
Mangla also has the rest of the economics worked out.
“Milk can be sold for use inside the jail and outside and that would then pay for the other expenses. Jail inmates who get a salary for the manual works that they do inside the jail can choose to tend to these cows and will be paid for it,” he said.
“The government will have to initially spend some amount on the construction of the sheds etc but after that it should run on its own,” he added.
But will it also mean “cow therapy” for jail inmates to help reform them? “There is no doubt that the jail inmates will be affected mentally also by serving cows. Serving cows will lead to a change in the thought process of the inmates,” Mangla replied.
Anuradha Modi of the Delhi-based Holy Cow Foundation echoes that sentiment.
“We started a small cow shed in Tihar jail in 2015. However a much bigger one can easily be made in the space where the semi-open jail is being run,” Modi said.
“There is no shortage of labour in jail and jail inmates can be taught to manufacture cow products from the dung and mootra, apart from milk. Also there is no doubt that inmates who tend to cows show marked behavioural changes for the better.”
The Gau Sewa Commission in Punjab too wanted to build gaushalas in jails in November 2015 when the state was ruled by the SAD-BJP combine. But the proposal did not make it past the state jail department.
In 2013, Rajasthan had sought to associate prisoners with cows to solve the problem of overcrowding in its jails. It was proposed that inmates who had served more than 10 years or were well behaved were to be kept in “open” jails in government cow shelters where they were to live and take care of cows for the rest of their sentence.