The Tripura Board of Secondary Education awarded Bikash Majumdar and Biswajit Dey the first division in the higher secondary examination this year. Scores of 17 and 18-year-olds accomplish this feat every year – so why is Majumdar and Dey’s success newsworthy? The two young men happen to be murder convicts, serving life terms at the Agartala Central Prison.

Majumdar and Dey scored 323 and 304 respectively out of a possible 500. One more lifer at the Agartala prison, Gour Acharjee, passed the examination in the second division. Gour missed the first division by only five marks. All three got over 75% marks in some papers.Yet another convict serving life imprisonment, Kulendra Debbarma, passed Madhyamik (the school-leaving exam) in the second division this year.

In a country where prison has merely been a place to filter out undesirable elements so that mainstream society doesn’t have to deal with them, the call for prison reforms and prisoner rehabilitation is often ignored. Fortunately, it has been reaching the right ears in recent years. Retired police officer Kiran Bedi’s efforts at Tihar Jail are well-known. In its own quiet way, Agartala Central Prison has been making a difference.

Restarting education is not the easiest of tasks for inmates whose confidence in their academic prowess has been dented by circumstances. “I was doing business before I landed here,” Debbarma says. “Education was not really my cup of tea and I never studied properly. After my sentence I was very upset, unsure of my future and the things I can do.”

However, jail authorities and other inmates intervened, and encouraged Debbarma to resume his education, he says. Now, he wants to press on and take his journey in education as far as it will go.

In the last twenty years, everybody who has taken the board examination from the Agartala prison has passed it, happy sub-jailer Sukumar Chettri says. “But this is the first time someone – in fact, two -- made it to the first division.” The success of the four convicts has been a catalyst for the other inmates, he says, adding that seven more inmates are applying to appear in the board examinations next year.

The exams have given the inmate-students a second chance to make their family and friends proud. “My son’s success made my family joyful,” Biswajit Dey’s father says. “He made a mistake in life, but now he wants to live life in a different way.”

It’s a difficult journey, but the inmates with educational aspirations have a secret ally in jail – Ramen Majumdar, a fellow inmate. He entered the jail 12 years ago, to serve 67 years on various charges in connection with a murder. He doesn’t like to talk about his past. What he does live for today is education. He completed his higher secondary and bachelor’s and master’s degrees while in jail. He is now a Ph.D. aspirant in education, and officially a teacher at the Agartala prison.

The success of the four students under Ramen Majumdar’s guidance was not free of hiccups. On June 4, when the results were announced, the inmate students for higher secondary were marked “absent” in the history examination. The Agartala Central Jail officials brought the mistake to the notice of the Secondary Education Board, which corrected its mistake, and then sprang a pleasant surprise on the inmates and their well-wishers by awarding two of them the first division.

A day later, Tripura’s prison minister, Manindra Reang, prison officials and the state’s Secondary Education Board president Amitabha Debroy felicitated Biswajit Majumdar, Bikash Dey and the others for their achievements.

Minister Reang’s words at the function should be encouraging to prison reform activists, who have been calling for such a voice from officialdom: “Jail is not a compound for punishment; it is a place to reform a person’s character. We want these youth to learn and become educated, so that they can find a new ray of light.”

By Tanmoy Chakraborty