In a move to extend legal support, awareness and literacy to the underprivileged undertrials across India, Chairman of Bharti Enterprises Sunil Mittal on Thursday said that he would take a voluntary cut of Rs 5-crore from his annual salary to provide legal and financial assistance to the undertrials, who are languishing in jails for minor offences through its arm Nyaya Bharti. After launching Bharti’s education and sanitation initiative, this is the unique initiative launched by the telecom major.
“Nyaya Bharti’, which will start with Rs 10 crore funding from Bharti Enterprises, will help the undertrials at district court-level by paying bail and surety amounts. To start with, we will roll out Nyaya Bharti in the Delhi-NCR and Punjab and add more states such as Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana and Rajasthan. Bharti Airtel will contribute Rs 10 crore each year as part of CSR for this project,” Mittal told the reporters at a round-table conference here.
When asked about how the idea came into his mind, he said the idea of launching the legal aid service, besides Bharti’s education and sanitation initiative under CSR, came to him during his visits to Patiala court for his case. “Most undertrials suffer in jails simply because of their ignorance of the law and their rights to liberty, their inability to pay the meagre amounts required for bails and bonds and lack of persons to stand surety,” he said.
Mittal said half of the funding, or Rs 5 crore, would come from the salary he draws. The initiative, for which young lawyers will be roped in to pour into thousands of cases of languishing undertrials, bring them to a screening committee and provide them legal defence, including bail bonds, is aimed at being rolled out by April 1, 2016.
“It is estimated that there are over 280,000 undertrials in 1,387 jails in India, constituting nearly 68 per cent of the total prisoner population,” he said, adding only first time offenders charged with minor offences will be taken up. The proportion of undertrials is amongst the world’s ten worst and many of the undertrials have been in custody for periods longer than the prison term had they been convicted.
Under Nyaya Bharti, a screening committee of independent persons will be set up that will identify the cases that need to be taken up. It will work under the aegis of Bharti Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Bharti Enterprises, and will have a separate Governing Board.
Former Chief Justice of India AS Anand will be the chairman of the Governing Board. Other members of the 12-member Board include former Solicitor General Harish N Salve and senior counsel Maninder Singh and Sanjaya Baru, who was media advisor to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Mittal and his brother Rakesh Bharti Mittal too would be on the board.
Under CSR, Bharti Enterprises will spend about Rs 100 crore a year on building schools and toilets and running Nyaya Bharti. The company has also earmarked Rs 100 crore on sanitation programme in the next three years which it will now complete in two years. “So it would come to around Rs 45-50 crore a year. On education, we are spending Rs 50 crore annually in 254 schools. Across 140 schools we are also augmenting the infrastructure. In next two years we will be spending around Rs 60 crore on capital expenditure,” Mittal said.