Mumbai Police’s new weapon against custody suicides: A T-Shirt and shorts | Mumbai News
4 min readMumbaiApr 26, 2026 07:00 AM IST
When six robbery suspects appeared before the media at Antop Hill police station recently, something unusual caught everyone’s attention: all were dressed identically in maroon short-sleeved t-shirts and black shorts. The matching outfits weren’t for show: they are Mumbai Police’s latest measure to prevent suicides by prisoners in police custody; a new uniform for any accused who lands in a police lock-up.
With over 54 deaths recorded in police custody or remand in Maharashtra between 2020 and 2023, one of the highest in the country, Mumbai Police have turned to an unlikely preventive measure: take away the most common instrument of suicide, which is the detainees’ own clothing. The new uniform is stark in its simplicity: a maroon short-sleeved t-shirt and black shorts. No long sleeves to make a noose. No pant legs to fashion into a rope.
Of the over 54 custodial deaths between 2020 and 2023, many were attributed to suicide. These numbers do not include recent incidents, including the July 2024 case, when 27-year-old Ankit Rao, working as a chef at a hotel near the Mumbai airport, was arrested on the charge of stealing mobile phones belonging to his roommates. He was kept in the Sahar police lock-up, where he hung himself. In May 2024, Anuj Thapan, an accused in the firing case outside actor Salman Khan’s residence, hung himself in the Crime Branch lock-up using a bedsheet.
On the new dress, an officer said, “We have been following this practice for a while to ensure inmates, who can be vulnerable soon after arrest, do not die by suicide using their clothes.”
The officer said they have a few sets of these ‘uniforms’, which are washed regularly before a new inmate wears it. The officer, however, said not all police stations have these uniforms yet.
The officer added that while over the years, police have ensured nothing that can be used by inmates to harm themselves is kept in the lock-up, prisoners have used their clothes to hang themselves.
Besides the new uniforms, several other measures have been brought in such as CCTV cameras with police personnel continuously scanning footage to check if an accused has been in the bathroom for too long, and the top and bottom portions of bathroom doors being removed so that the doors do not cover the entire frame and police can enter if they suspect the accused is attempting suicide.
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“In a lot of cases, these suicides take place in the bathrooms as inmates use pipes jutting out to hang themselves using their clothes,” the officer said.
While in rural districts, each police station has a lock-up, in cities like Mumbai there are one or two police lock-ups for seven to eight police stations making it difficult to keep an eye on inmates constantly.
In India, prison uniforms are governed by state prison rules but broadly follow the framework of the Model Prison Manual 2016. Convicted prisoners are required to wear prescribed jail uniforms, which vary by state but are typically colour-coded and standardised. In contrast, undertrial prisoners who have not been convicted are generally not supposed to be forced to wear prison uniforms and are allowed to wear their own clothes. This makes the new measure of making inmates wear t-shirt and shorts a completely new initiative.
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