The ballooning under-trial population in India is widely acknowledged to be a serious challenge to the effectiveness and legitimacy of India’s criminal justice system. So far academic, policy and civil society work on this problem has focused on analysing the under-trial prison population after they are detained. In this study we engage with the problem at an earlier stage in the criminal justice process, i.e., the bail decision making in the law courts.
To understand how bail decisions are made and the considerations that drive bail decisions we will focus on two data sources: court observation of bail decisions for 45 days and official court records for 6 months in the criminal courts in three districts of Karnataka – Bengaluru, Dharwad and Tumakuru.
The study was carried out by a team at the Centre for Law and Policy Research and is supported by a grant from the Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives. We will publish the final Report shortly.
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