India | Updated Jan 25, 2011 at 07:35pm IST

Jail tourism to start soon in W Bengal

Press Trust Of India

Kolkata: Many people have at most a foggy idea of how a jail looks like inside and unless someone commits a crime, there is no way of knowing. But no longer.

In two months from now they will be welcome inside jails as tourists, as for the first time in the country a tour will be conducted in the correctional homes in West Bengal.

The State Correctional Administration in collaboration with the Tourism Department is going to start a tour at the correctional homes of the states.

Jail tourism to start soon in W Bengal

"We have got a go-ahead from the state government and the principal secretary of the Tourism Department, Raghavendra Singh, has promised all help enabling us to start the unique venture in two months from now," Additional Director-General

(Prison) B D Sharma told PTI.

Sharma says the tour will be a two-way traffic. It will present ordinary people an idea of how a correctional home is run and the inmates, cut off from the outside world, will be able to interact with people.

"We need to generate awareness among masses that the prisoners or those undergoing trials are not a different set of people, but are only from amongst us," Sharma said.

The first correctional home to be thrown open to tourists is the Hooghly Correctional Home where famous revolutionary Bengali poet was imprisoned way back in 1922 during British rule.

Arrested in November 23, 1922, Nazrul was sentenced to a year's rigorous imprisonment in the jail for sedition.

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