Punjab Jail Department, with the active assistance of the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), will open retail outlets of the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) across the Central Prison Premises in the State.
“An MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) would be inked with the IOC on June 3 in Patiala for the same,” said the state’s Jail Minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa on Thursday while interacting with the representatives of the Indian Oil Corporation.
Elaborating more, the Minister said that the land would be provided by the Government and the initial thrust would be to launch the project in Patiala, Ludhiana, Sangrur, Gurdaspur, Ferozepur, Hoshiarpur and Amritsar.
The Minister said that the initiative would result in providing job avenues in ample measures to the inmates as the retail outlets would comprise of petrol stations as well as the food courts.
Randhawa said that the jail inmates would also be engaged in the vocation of preparing the uniform to be worn while on job at the petrol stations. Besides, the thrust is also on to employ inmates at the factories owned by the cooperative sector institutions such as Sugarfed.
The proposed initiative would not only channelize the energies of the inmates to flow in a constructive direction but would also afford them a chance to be assimilated into the societal mainstream in a better way once they are released from prison, he said.
IOC executive director Sujoy Chaudhary said that the IOC would also assess the possibility to replicate the projects in other parts of Punjab once the latter gets going in the places earmarked initially.
