CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu continues to be the best-performing state in the management of its prisons department, but poor when it comes to its police and legal aid, according to the 2025 India Justice Report (IJR) released on Tuesday.
IJR ranks states on delivery of justice in the country. The report is prepared in collaboration with Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, DAKSH, TISS-Prayas, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, and How India Lives, IJR’s data partner.
The 2025 report claimed that Tamil Nadu prisons retained their top position from last year as they had the lowest share of undertrial prisoners (61.5%), and one of the lowest occupancy rates (77%) in the country.
The state had also increased the spending per inmate while reducing staff vacancies in both cadre and officers, which is also among the lowest in the country.
Tamil Nadu is among the three large states to meet the benchmark of six inmates per cadre staff, the report said, adding that the vacancy in medical officers in prisons has risen significantly, from 12% to 26%.
The report however criticised the performance of TN police, claiming that in 2021-22, there was no utilisation of modernisation funds given as a centrally-sponsored scheme grant with a centre-state ratio of 60:40.
The report claimed that Tamil Nadu reported no budget allocation or expenditure for training of police personnel and that the training institutes too reduced between 2022 and 2023 from 24 to 9, leading to a considerable burden in terms of average number of police personnel per training institute.
However, a senior TN police official said that the statistics provided in the report were wrong. “They have reviewed limited parameters. (Government agencies like) NCRB and BPRD do extensive data collation which can be relied upon. Limited studies (like these) suffer a lacuna,” the official said.
The report claimed that the vacancy at the officer level in state police increased threefold between the previous two editions of the report and that the vacancy was at 28% now.
An area of concern was the sub-par utilisation, low per capita spending, 50% vacancies in district legal services authority, just one para legal volunteer per lakh population, and poor disposal rate of State Legal Services Authority (SLSA) Lok Adalats, the report said.