The prisoners pressed forward, barely heeding the guards who tried to keep them in line. No one wanted to miss a chance to use a new telephone booth, rarely seen inside an Indian jail. The men clutched plastic phone cards decorated with a photograph of the Taj Mahal, the famed Indian monument to love.

Each inmate was granted just five minutes, or even less, as other hands and elbows jutted into the narrow orange cubicles. But on this first day of phone service at the Bangalore Central Jail, even a brief connection proved reassuring. The callers could reassert their roles as husbands, fathers, and brothers, not merely the cramped inhabitants of Barracks 8 and 9. Raju Balakumar, a 34year-old former truck driver, got through to an elder sister who lives 300 kilometers away and never comes to visit. "Her voice sounded the same," he said, grinning.

In the women's section, 27-year-old Fatmawati decided to forgo her routine purchase of soap and toothpaste in order to scrape together some 100 rupees (HK$19.07) for a phone card. She called her elder brother in Bangalore, venting frustration at being confined for 25 months with no end in sight to her trial. "I told him, please come here and visit me, and meet me in court, and do something soon to get me out of this place!" she said.

Fatmawati's newfound link to her brother marks a small but significant step toward improving life behind bars in India, where two thirds of the nation's 332,000 prisoners have yet to be convicted of any crime. The sluggish criminal justice system mostly ensnares the poor and ill educated; those awaiting trial have long endured the same overcrowded conditions, meager food, medical neglect and isolation from the outside world as any convicted offender. Indeed, the inmates known as "undertrials" have often faced bleaker days than convicts. Barred from prison factory work or study sessions, many undertrials could not find a way to keep busy during the dreary years spent waiting for a court decision.

But some shards of light are beginning to pierce this dim realm. Over the last two years, states including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have started to carry out more prison reforms at the urging of the judiciary, human rights advocates, and even some pioneering prison authorities. Some changes are as simple as providing light bulbs and mosquito repellent in cells. More wide-ranging reforms aim to promote regular contact with relatives and lawyers, while expanding educational and vocational programs for those awaiting trial. Although the Tihar Jail in New Delhi has been a high-profile laboratory for reform since the 1990s, the changes now underway aim to offer some relief to prisoners and their families in cities and towns far from the capital.

"I feel a very good beginning has been made, and it is very consistent and very promising," says Murali Karnam, a Hyderabad-based consultant for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), a non-government organization based in New Delhi. Karnam says he is most impressed with the increasing judicial oversight of prison conditions in his home state of Andhra Pradesh. Legal aid centers staffed with social workers and pro bono lawyers now operate inside 140 prisons across the state. And grievance boxes allow inmates to complain directly to the judiciary, without censorship from prison officials. Adds Karnam: "The prison department is realizing that it cannot run prisons as completely closed institutions."

This awareness also stems from generational change, observes BN Chattoraj, a professor at the National Institute of Criminology and Forensic Sciences in New Delhi. "Prison officers who are comparatively young have understood that reforms are necessary," he says.

In Karnataka, more openness came with the April 17 debut of 10 phone booths at the Bangalore Central Jail. This was downright revolutionary in India, even though phone calls are routine in Western jails. In the United States, for example, the Federal Bureau of Prisons considers the telephone "a valuable tool in the overall correctional process" because it strengthens family and community ties.

In India, not even the showcase Tihar Jail offers prisoners regular use of a telephone. Nationwide, prison authorities fear that calls will veer into criminality, such as extortion. But for ST Ramesh, appointed last July as Karnataka's Additional Director General of Police and Inspector of Prisons, it makes sense to allow weekly calls.

"Prisoners feel extremely stressed out. They are constantly worried about their families. Some of them get frustrated, and feel angry and helpless," explains Ramesh. "I want to provide alternative channels of communication, and reduce their stress levels." Previously, their sole outlet was an infrequent, 10-minute family visit. To prevent criminal activity, calls are recorded and monitored.

The phone booths also help reduce the gap between the majority of poor prisoners and the few influential inmates who manage to wield mobile phones that are technically banned. The problem flared in late April in northern Uttar Pradesh, where six politicians awaiting trial on abduction and murder charges were discovered using mobile phones behind bars to campaign for re- election.

"The big people, the mafia people, they have mobile phones. If we had an emergency, we had to go to them," says Satyavara Prasad, a soft-spoken 33-year-old inmate in Bangalore.

"Now we can go [to the phone booth] and communicate with our lawyers, family members and friends. We can share our problems."

It is impossible to generalize about the pace of change within India's patchwork of 1,147 prisons. Each state is responsible for running its own penal institutions, with minimal national oversight. But the Bureau of Prison Research and Development in New Delhi is encouraging wardens to swap "best practices." This includes the spread of traditional meditation techniques, which has helped improve discipline and calm in Tihar Jail. In Madhya Pradesh, for example, yoga is now being launched as a daily routine throughout the state's 116 jails.

Other ideas have come from abroad. In recent years, Indian prison officials have embarked on study tours of penal institutions in Europe. Innovations are also discussed via the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA), which counts members from 70 countries.

China, too, is showing increased curiosity on how other countries run their prisons. China joined the ICPA in 2000 and Chinese officials say they have started to apply some ideas from Canada and Singapore. At present, China's Ministry of Justice and the British Council are collaborating on a three-year project to increase human rights protection in prison through training and reforming prison management.

In India, the vast number of illiterate prisoners is a major cause for concern. Many literacy programs have not reached their intended targets. But it seems that Madhya Pradesh is making a better effort than most states, ensuring that 17,000 inmates learned to read and write over the past three years. For the tiny percentage of college graduates behind bars, an MBA course is now available.

The challenge remains to provide more inmates with distance education opportunities, which could help get them back on their feet after release. In Andhra Pradesh, for example, the Dr BR Ambedkar Open University has awarded degrees to 400 inmates since 1983, and established four study centers inside state prisons. "Money is not a problem. Leadership is important, to see that we provide education to the population that is unreached," says the university's former rector, V Venkaiah. Bangalore University just began offering courses to 500 students scattered throughout 80 jails in Karnataka. Prison officials have made it a point to include undertrials in these learning opportunities, rather than reserve classes for convicts alone.

So what are they learning at the Bangalore Central Jail? One recent class sounded like a lesson in the problems facing the criminal justice system, although it was billed as part of a bachelor of commerce degree course.

Addressing four undertrials hunched on a bench, the lecturer expounded on the "the limitations of planning," and explained: "It is a time consuming process. It is costly. It will take its own sweet time. When it comes to implementation, there is a lack of capital, lack of products."

Likewise, plenty of high-level recommendations have failed to speed up justice and decongest prisons, complains Vijay Raghavan, program coordinator at the Center for Criminology and Justice at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences. "There is no dearth of ideas. It's a question of putting them into practice," he maintains.

Key tasks include decriminalizing many petty offenses, reducing bail for poor offenders and devising a system of community service that would substitute for incarceration, according to Raghavan. Others agree. "We know that some of the undertrials are there for stealing a goat or a bicycle. There are various other ways of dealing with them, rather than shutting them up inside," argues Rani Dhavan Shankardass, chairwoman of the London-based group Penal Reform International.

Nineteen year old Vijaya has spent more than three months in the Bangalore Central Jail after confessing to the theft of a gold bangle and a pair of earrings worth about 10,000 rupees. Her two-and-a-half-year-old son Manjunath is also behind bars, since Vijaya says she could not leave him with his alcoholic father. Each morning Manjunath attends a nursery school outside the prison, a reform instituted by prison inspector Ramesh. But the system has also failed Vijaya. She could not attend an April 19 court session because there was no available policewoman to escort her. So the case was postponed, and the pair is still in prison, in limbo.

"I have a pain in my heart that he is growing up in jail," she says, glancing tearfully at the toddler. "Everyone will talk about it. I can listen to anything against me, but not my son."

Ramesh acknowledges that the shortage of police escorts is a widely discussed problem. But there is no quick fix. The number of VIPs who visit the famed high-tech city of Bangalore and require a police escort puts a strain on resources, he explains.

In New Delhi, prison officials are proud to cite the 18 billion rupees, five- year "modernization scheme," mostly funneled into constructing new prisons. But not everyone thinks this is the answer.

"The more prisons you build, the more you are going to justify sending more and more people to them. It's the American syndrome," says Shankardass. At present, the United States has the highest percentage of its population incarcerated worldwide: 738 prisoners per 100,000 people. India, in contrast, has just 30 prisoners per 100,000.

When they do get out of jail, they do not seem to repeat their mistakes. In a system clogged with first offenders, the recidivism rate is only 10 percent. In rural areas, particularly, social control prevails and the circumstances that produced the first crime do not normally recur.

That is one reason why Rajasthan, a rugged northern state, is starting to expand open prisons. During the day, inmates leave the prison camps to work as carpenters, homeopathic doctors, math tutors, and even security guards. At night, they return to the camps, where they sleep together with their spouses and children. "It reduces the burden on the state exchequer. And it gives them the opportunity to integrate with family," explains Radha Kant Saxena, a Jaipur-based consultant for CHRI.

Surprisingly, even convicted murderers are eligible to live in such camps, as long as a local judge and the victim's relatives consent. "Ninety-eight percent of these killings occur on the spur of the moment," Saxena explains. "It is not a crime for money. It is a crime for prestige and respect. In due course of time, even the victim's family members start feeling that keeping the person in prison is no use."