The Tihar Jail Vipassana story: 1,000 prisoners on one course

In April 1994 more than 1,000 prisoners at Tihar Jail in New Delhi sat a single 10-day Vipassana course, taught by S. N. Goenka in a tent that the prisoners had helped to build. It followed two smaller courses arranged by Kiran Bedi, then Inspector General of Prisons, and it led to a permanent meditation centre inside the jail, Dhamma Tihar.

This page tells the story in more detail than our overview of Vipassana in prisons. Nearly all of it comes from people who took part: the Vipassana Research Institute (VRI), the officers and teachers who ran the courses, and Bedi herself. Their accounts are first-hand but not independent, so where their numbers differ, both are given.

Tihar before Vipassana

Tihar is a large prison complex in suburban Delhi, divided in 1994 into four separate jails. Sources give its population at the time as anything from about 8,000 to 10,000, and they agree that roughly nine in ten inmates were "undertrials", people held while awaiting trial rather than serving a sentence.

Kiran Bedi became Inspector General in May 1993. VRI's newsletter of September 1994 quotes Tarsem Kumar, Superintendent of Jail No. 2, on the staff's old belief that making prisoners suffer would stop them offending again. "But they were mistaken," he said, and he repeated a Planning Commission member's remark that "the prisoners at Tihar were doing their PhD in crime."

Bedi began other reforms before any meditation course, from a complaint box she read daily to literacy classes and detoxification. Her 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service was given partly for this work at Tihar.

How the idea reached the jail

The accounts credit more than one person. According to VRI, M. L. Mehta, an Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, wrote in July 1993 to Ram Singh, a Vipassana teacher and former Home Secretary of Rajasthan, asking whether a course could be held at Tihar. (P. L. Dhar, a professor at IIT Delhi who helped teach the first course, says the letter went to Bedi.)

In the same weeks, VRI says, Bedi was on her rounds with an assistant superintendent and wondered aloud how the prisoners' emotional problems could be solved. He answered: "Ma'am, why don't you try Vipassana? This is what has helped me to decrease my anger." Dhar names him as Rajinder Kumar.

Bedi's own version, in a 1999 conversation published by Inquiring Mind, also gives the idea to a guard: "One of the guards suggested that I look into the vipassana program." Explaining why she agreed, she said: "Peace and harmony isn't created by the walls of a prison; it comes from the beings inside, and unless you address individuals, you cannot create a peaceful community."

Ram Singh had invited Goenka to teach the first courses in an Indian jail, at Jaipur in 1975 and 1977. He advised that Tihar's staff should take a course first. Tarsem Kumar writes that eleven staff members were sent to 10-day courses at the Jaipur or Delhi centres. According to VRI, Bedi deliberately chose some of the angriest officers.

The first course, November 1993

The first course ran from 22 November to 3 December 1993 in Ward 10 of Jail No. 2, where most convicted prisoners were held. Ram Singh taught it, assisted by P. L. Dhar and a teacher from Faridabad. Ninety-six prisoners took part, ten of them awaiting trial, together with 23 staff. There was no hall, so the course was held in a tent.

Dhar's report on the course is unusually frank. Until the day before, no staff member was willing to join; the 23 came on Bedi's instructions, and one officer who left on the third day was sent back. A few inmates of the ward joined, he writes, "only because they did not want to be shifted to some other place for twelve days", and "discipline was therefore a casualty". On the sixth day the students who were not serious were moved elsewhere. Even so, he counted about 60 inmates who "tried their best to meditate seriously".

The silence ended in front of the press. Bedi, remembering the day six years later, said: "some of the men were in tears. I'd never seen these men cry. They only make others cry." She recalled prisoners saying things like: "I was planning to murder a magistrate or my witness or my victim's family when I got out, but now I realize the futility of that thought." Dhar's report, written at the time, describes one such moment: a convict told the press that he had drawn up detailed plans to kill the judge who convicted him, and had burnt them on the seventh day of the course.

According to VRI, the prisoners then "jokingly told Ram Singh that they would not let him leave the jail until he promised to hold more Vipassana courses there soon". Goenka was contacted, and the next courses began on New Year's Day.

January 1994: four courses at once

From 1 to 12 January 1994 six assistant teachers ran four courses at the same time in three of the jails. VRI's newsletter puts the total at "about 300 prisoners"; Tarsem Kumar gives 334 participants, most of them undertrials.

VRI's newsletter says that after these January courses the Ministry of Home Affairs called a meeting of Inspectors General of Prisons from across India, where "a proposal was adopted to introduce Vipassana as a reform measure in all the prisons in the country". Another VRI page places the meeting after the April course. No government record of the meeting was found.

The course for a thousand, April 1994

Bedi wanted the whole prison to have the chance, and at a few hundred a time that would take years. She proposed a course for a thousand. Ram Singh, VRI says, remembered a prediction by Goenka's own teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who, on hearing that Goenka's early courses in India had reached 100 students, said that one day Goenka would teach a thousand. Bedi recalled Goenka telling them: "For me, it was my teacher's prophesy coming true."

VRI says prisoners did most of the building work in an empty area of Jail No. 4: drains, levelling, a new building for the teachers and a huge tent to serve as the meditation hall.

On the evening of 4 April 1994, according to VRI's newsletter, 1,003 men gathered in the tent for Goenka's opening instructions. At the same time the first course for women prisoners began in Jail No. 1, with 49 students and two women assistant teachers.

	Figure given	Source
Men on the course	1,003	VRI newsletter, September 1994
Men on the course	1,004	Tarsem Kumar, Tihar superintendent
Men on the course	"around 1,100"	Kiran Bedi, 1999 interview
Assistant teachers	13 men, plus 2 women on the women's course	VRI newsletter
Assistant teachers	10 in one passage, 13 in another	VRI prisons history page
Length	10 days, 4 to 15 April	VRI
Length	"11-day" course	Karuna Films, the documentary's producers

The newsletter says the students faced charges from drug trafficking and robbery to murder and rape, came from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Buddhist backgrounds, and more than a third could not read. Twenty-eight of the students, men and women, were foreigners. About 60 prisoners from earlier courses served the new students.

Early on the first day a storm brought the tent down and soaked every cushion. At 3:30 a.m. the assistant teachers met to decide whether to cancel the course. They chose to meditate with the students in their wards instead, while prisoners not on the course dried more than 1,000 cushions and repaired the tent. It was ready by 7 p.m. for Goenka's first talk.

Goenka gave the evening talks in Hindi and answered questions each night; the talks were filmed for Zee TV. Asked by a journalist why Vipassana suits prisoners, he replied, as VRI reports it, that it is good for everyone: "We are all prisoners of the negative habit patterns of our own minds." He also said: "What is happening at Tihar is a message of hope which will benefit the whole world."

Dhamma Tihar, the centre inside the jail

After the final sitting on 15 April 1994, about 1,100 students, staff and guests stayed to see Goenka open a permanent centre in Jail No. 4, which he named Dhamma Tihar. VRI calls it the first Vipassana centre inside a prison. Within three weeks, it says, the centre was holding two 10-day courses a month for prisoners from all four jails.

Bedi spoke at the opening, in Hindi. VRI's translation includes: "Take care and spread happiness in society. A short time ago we chose our motto: 'Be happy and give happiness.' We never expected that Vipassana would teach us the same thing."

She left Tihar in 1995. In 1999 she said the centre offered one-day courses and that some prisoners had sat 14 or even 18 ten-day courses. A later VRI page says 20-day courses are held there too. Dhamma Tihar does not appear in dhamma.org's public centre directory, and we could not confirm from Delhi Prisons how often it runs courses today.

What the staff reported

Tarsem Kumar interviewed 50 prisoners three weeks after the first course, checking their answers with cellmates. Most, he wrote, said they had "better control of their anger"; many had cut down or given up smoking; staff relations with convicts "greatly improved". Dhar's before-and-after questionnaires, answered by 74 prisoners, found that 24% admitted their crime before the course and 48% afterwards. Both are reports by people who organised or taught the course, not independent evaluations.

The AIIMS study, as VRI describes it

VRI publishes a study carried out under the aegis of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). As VRI presents it, a first study tested 120 prisoners in January 1994. A second, in April 1994, compared 85 prisoners who volunteered for the large course with 65 who did not. Immediately afterwards course participants were "less hostile" and "felt less helpless", and those with psychiatric symptoms reported less anxiety and depression. At three and six months the authors reported further gains on many measures, "although the initial improvement in hope and hostility was not sustained".

Read this with care. Participants chose themselves, so they may have differed from the comparison group from the start. The paper thanks VRI for financial support and was read at a 1995 conference of the Vipassana International Academy in Igatpuri. Beyond two short conference abstracts, we found no peer-reviewed report of the study. VRI's prisons page dates the study 1997, while its reference list gives 1995. For how to weigh studies like this, see what research says about Vipassana.

The film that carried the story abroad

Two Israeli filmmakers, Ayelet Menahemi and Eilona Ariel, spent five months in India in the winter of 1994–95 making Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. The documentary opens with Tihar and ends at Baroda Jail in Gujarat. It is generally dated 1997 and won the Golden Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1998.

The film travelled further than the courses. VRI says the governor of Lancaster Castle prison in England "was inspired by the video of the Tihar jail courses" before a course was held there. Lucia Meijer, who ran the North Rehabilitation Facility near Seattle, said she changed her mind about Vipassana "after I saw the film". Swe Win, a former political prisoner in Myanmar, wrote in 2013 that the documentary was shown at Myingyan prison a month before his release in 2005.

What happened next in Indian prisons

VRI reports that 75 courses were held in Indian jails in 1997, and 39 courses for 1,420 inmates in 2001. A second permanent centre opened at Nashik jail in Maharashtra and was later closed "because of administrative changes". An undated VRI page says more than 50 courses a year are now held in Indian prisons. These are the tradition's own figures; no official national count was found.

The Tihar courses, like all courses in Goenka's tradition, were free and followed the same format as the 10-day course at public centres. In Nepal, VRI says, the first prison course was held at Nakkhu jail in November 1998, and in 2024 a permanent centre opened inside Nakkhu prison, Dhamma Āsaya. The wider history, including studies in Seattle and Alabama, is in Vipassana in prisons.