Supreme Court: In a public interest litigation petition challenging the provisions of prison manuals of several states for allowing caste-based discrimination for division of manual labour, the three-Judge Bench of Dr. DY Chandrachud, CJI, JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, JJ. found several lacunas in the manuals which violate the Constitutional principles and held that all such provisions to be unconstitutional.
The Bench directed all the states to make changes in the manuals in accordance with the judgment. The Court took suo motu cognizance of the discrimination and directed the registry to list In re: discrimination inside prisons after three months and States shall submit compliance reports.
Condemning the discriminatory rules, the Court opined that assigning cleaning and sweeping to the marginalized and assigning cooking to higher caste violates Article 15 of the Constitution.
Source: Press
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