Legal aid cuts jail time for undertrials, but help often arrives late

India jails fewer people than most countries — about 41 for every 1,00,000 people — yet more than three-quarters of its prisoners in 2022 were awaiting trial. That places India fourth in the world in the share of undertrials in its prison population. Many of them are poor, poorly educated, or from marginalised communities and remain in jail not because they have been convicted but because they cannot navigate the system or afford a lawyer.Free legal aid is meant to close this gap. The Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 created the National Legal Services Authority to provide free legal services to weaker sections of society. But three decades on, limited outreach, low awareness and uneven quality mean that many undertrials still go without timely help.A legal aid programme run since 2018 across eight prisons in Maharashtra offers insights into what such help can achieve. Implemented by Prayas (Tata Institute of Social Sciences) and the Fair Trial Fellowship (National Law University, Delhi), and funded by the Azim Premji Foundation, it targets those least able to secure representation: casual workers, women abandoned by their families, minorities, or migrant workers.By analysing the records of over 22,000 undertrials assisted between 2018 and 2023, it was found that the typical participant is 29 years old, and that close to half have studied only up to primary school. Further, 18% are women and 57% are casual wage workers. By comparing their outcomes with the district court records in Maharashtra and used national labour force and time use surveys, the costs of detention were estimated. To begin with, programme participants obtain bail far more often than the average applicant. Across 29 districts, 84% of participants’ bail applications succeeded, compared with 26% of all applications in the same district courts between 2015 and 2020. Participants did better in 28 of the 29 districts. The gap persists even within categories of offence severity, so it is not simply because the programme serves people accused of minor crimes. Within the programme, bail outcomes change sharply at intake. Before intake, the share of participants granted bail ranged from about 1% to 6% across groups by gender, income, education and occupation. After intake, it ranged from 61% to 92%.Timing, however, matters a great deal. Participants spent on average 171 days — more than five months — in jail before they entered the programme. Those released on bail spent a further 115 days in custody on average, taking the total from arrest to release to about eight months. In 2018, about 37% of Maharashtra’s 26,898 undertrials had been held for more than a year.The cost of detentionDetention before trial is costly for people who mostly live on daily earnings. The wages participants lose in custody was estimated by matching them to similar workers in the Periodic Labour Force Survey and multiplying their daily wage by the number of days they were detained. The losses are large relative to their incomes. From arrest to release, average losses reach up to about ₹2 lakh for some age groups, while more than 60% of participants earn less than ₹80,000 a year. Losses rise with age and peak among workers in their 50s.Losses also vary by group. After intake alone, those facing the most serious charges lose about ₹80,000 on average, nearly four times the ₹21,000 lost by those accused of the least severe offences. This is driven mainly by longer detention rather than higher earnings. Graduates and regular wage workers also lose more, since their wages are higher.The uncomfortable question this raises is: why do so many undertrials wait months for help that is already their right? Legal aid is usually seen as a matter of rights. These findings suggest it is also an intervention with economic returns. By helping undertrials file bail applications, coordinate with advocates, gather documents and meet release conditions, the programme appears to cut through the procedural frictions that prolong detention.Shorter detention can ease prison overcrowding, lower public spending on prisons, and limit income losses for vulnerable households. The most actionable lesson concerns timing. Legal aid can improve outcomes after intake, but it cannot recover the months already spent in jail. Identifying eligible prisoners at or soon after arrest could substantially raise its impact. Better data would also help. Caste, religion, income and migration status are missing for much of the sample, which limits what can be said about who benefits most.Comparing participants with similar defendants in court records would allow a rigorous evaluation of the programme’s effect, and tracking people after release would show whether the gains last. As governments seek to widen access to justice, legal aid works best when it reaches undertrial prisoners early enough to prevent unnecessary detention.Note: Programme participants are not randomly selected, so the comparisons are descriptive rather than causal. Wage and time losses are accounting estimates of the value of time spent in custody: predicted daily wages from the PLFS 2017-18 multiplied by days detained. Since undertrials differ from the general population, they should be read as upper-bound estimates. Each period is averaged over participants with valid dates for that period.