Bollywood superstar Salman Khan, in a rare gesture, has offered to bail out about 250 jail inmates in Uttar Pradesh who are languishing behind the bars because they cannot afford to pay the fine that the court has fixed for them.
Salman has offered to bail out the hapless prisoners through an NGO that recently approached the state officials with the offer.
Officials are now preparing to seek permission from the Election Commission before they get down to working out other modalities. According to a senior official, the total amount that the star will have to pay to ensure the release of about 250 prisoners is around `44 lakhs.
“Most of these prisoners are petty criminals and majority of them have completed their jail sentence but cannot be released because they have not paid the fine amount imposed by the court at the time of conviction. Their fine amount ranges from `2,000 to `10,000 and they have overstayed in the jail by two to five years because they could not afford to pay the amount,” the official said.
For instance, Rani Devi has completed her seven-year term in the women’s jail in Lucknow but has already spent an additional three years because she has been unable to pay the fine amount of `2,000.
In Gorakhpur jail, one inmate Rajiv Kumar Shah has not been able to pay the fine amount of `200 and has spent 15 days over his one-year term. The tentative number of such prisoners is about 38 in Bareilly, 28 in Moradabad, 26 in Varanasi, 23 in Sitapur, 18 in Gorakhpur and 17 in Naini central jail. Information from the other jails is still being compiled.