Walk into almost any district jail in India and you will find it holds far more people than it was built for — and a large share of them have not been convicted of anything. They are undertrials: men and women arrested, charged, and then left waiting, sometimes for years, for their trial to even begin. This is not a hypothetical problem. It is the single largest driver of prison overcrowding in the country, and it sits at the intersection of two rights the Constitution treats as fundamental: personal liberty under Article 21 and protection against arbitrary detention under Article 22. The recent flurry of Supreme Court weekly and monthly round-ups — tracking bail orders, prison-reform directions and constitutional pronouncements through late 2025 and into 2026 — keeps returning to this theme, because the machinery meant to fix it, a new provision in India's rewritten criminal procedure code, is still bedding in.