The Tihar transformer: Kiran Bedi

With an impressive repository of work, the most stellar of which is prison reforms in one of the toughest jails in Asia, she is idolised by young girls and women. Bedi has been credited with becoming the first woman IPS officer, making her way into essentially a male bastion. 

The tallest achievement of this fiery woman from Amritsar is the makeover she gave Tihar jail when she took charge as the first female Inspector General of the prison. In a tenure lasting from 1993 to 1995, her efforts brought a visible turnaround of the premises and its inmates. 

She was armed with a reputation of no-nonsense officer when she joined as IG, Tihar. Her style of working — which included not taking ‘no’ for an answer and seeing everyone as equal before law — earned her the moniker of ‘Crane Bedi’. Legend has it that as Delhi’s Deputy Commissioner of Police, Traffic, she once towed away then prime minister Indira Gandhi’ car when it was parked illegally. 

At Tihar, Bedi believed in reformation rather than punishment, and empowered them for a positive life. Her motto was not to incarcerate the prisoners but to give them hope of a better future once they step out as free people. 
Object is to ensure prison works as a reformatory not a place of recycling of crime and contamination. “A Prison reform model should be based on 3Cs – Collective, Corrective and Community,” she says on her personal blog.

The Ramon Magsaysay award winner included yoga, meditation, vipassana into the inmates’ routine and she participated in these practices with them. “The environment (at Tihar) was waiting for Vipassana,” she had said at the time. “We urgently needed a method of behavioural change like this. There was not other way we could find.”

She addressed the drug menace prevalent inside jail, sexual abuse and even formed a panchayat with inmates as representatives. They became the bridge between authorities and fellow inmates to talk about various problems and come up with solutions. Of the many pathbreaking steps she took under prison reforms one was legal advocacy.

The officer-turned-politician can always been heard motivating women to march ahead of men. “Mobility and physical fitness, when coupled with financial independence, will help women empower themselves,” she said at a function in Coimbatore. “This, when combined with innate feminine qualities, will help women outperform their male counterparts.”

After her superannuation, Bedi put her might behind eradicating corruption, and became a prominent face of the Anna Hazare movement in 2011 to demand introduction of the Jan Lokpal Bill. Four years later, she joined the Bharatiya Janata Party and unsuccessfully contested the Delhi Assembly elections as chief ministerial candidate. Since 2016, she has been serving as the Lt Governor of Puducherry.