Geeta Kesar, 43, stands surrounded by a lush green garden, with thermocol panels fashioned into planters and abandoned old utensils repurposed into pots. The flowers in her garden, the space of a cramped office cabin, grow out of seeds collected from city roads. There are roses and bougainvillea, petunia and bird of paradise. Adjacent to her garden stands a one-room tin-roofed house that had been her home for the past six years. As she waters her plants and checks for pests, an indie dog peeks through the half-open door, emitting growls loud enough to catch Kesar’s attention, but soft enough to not wake her five-year-old son who is fast asleep inside the house.

For Kesar and all her neighbours, to stand beneath the open sky, live with their families, and interact with the outside world, was a privilege that they earned after toiling hard for at least seven years. She and 374 others, many women, live in the Shri Sampurnanand Khula Bandi Shivir, an open jail in Sanganer, Rajasthan. This is a gated community-living facility with space for meeting and playing, located about 15 kilometres from Jaipur, and named after a past Governor of the State.

“Most of us were first overwhelmed when we got here,” she says, remembering the first time she looked at the open sky from her room in Sanganer: “I cried uncontrollably, but I had all kinds of thoughts rushing through my mind. This is a second chance for me, yes, but how will I survive here, how will I make a living, how will I do this all alone,” Kesar asked herself.

In Rajasthan, a State with the highest number of open jails in India, a convict who has ser