Hyderabad: After his first night in a prison cell, Satyam Computer Services Ltd founder B. Ramalinga Raju woke up to have a brief morning walk in the jail premises followed by a breakfast of pulihora, or tamarind rice.
Later in the afternoon, Raju complained of chest pain and, according to K. Newton, superintendent of the Chanchalguda Central Prison, a jail doctor attended to him. Raju was all right after the treatment, Newton said.
Raju skipped lunch, but had bread and tea in the afternoon and had an hour-long discussion with brother Rama, according to prison officials who did not want to be named. The jail serves chicken curry, rice and rasam on Sundays, but it was not known whether Raju had any of it.
During the day, Raju’s relatives went to the jail, but prison officials declined their request to meet him because the rules do not allow such visits on a Sunday.
According to the jail manual, prison inmates are to be given 650g of rice, 250g of vegetable curry and 125g of dal thrice a day. A prison official said the Raju brothers were given a blanket and a bed-sheet in the cell. They asked for and were given newspapers.
The brothers are housed in a barrack with 26 other persons remanded to judicial custody, according to the official. Jail authorities said there were strict instructions from the state government that no special treatment should be extended to the Raju brothers, who were shifted to the jail on Saturday after their arrest on Friday.
The instructions were given in the light of criticism that jail officials had doled out favours to Nagarjuna Finance Ltd promoter K.S. Raju, who was under judicial custody after the firm defaulted on payments to depositors to the tune of Rs100 crore.
Jail authorities had permitted K.S. Raju to shift to a city hospital on medical grounds, but the government, responding to criticism, replaced the prison’s superintendent with Newton.
Srinivas Vadlamani, the chief financial officer of Satyam, who was produced before a magistrate and remanded to custody till 24 January on Sunday, will now be a fellow prison inmate of the Raju brothers and lodged in the same barrack.
c.sukumar@livemint.com