India gets teeth against
corruption By Siddharth
Srivastava
NEW DELHI - It is considered
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's most-pointed
attempt at curbing corruption, which has reached
pandemic proportions in the country. The Right to
Information Act (RTI) came into force last week,
giving Indians the legal right to seek information
from government and aiming to curb corruption.
The new law is meant to curb corruption
and inefficiency in the government at various
levels and covers all central and state
administrations, panchayats (traditional
village institutions), local bodies and
non-governmental organizations that get public
funds. Under the act, the authorities are required
to respond to queries in as little as 48 hours, if
it is a matter of life and liberty.
The
law aims to ingrain accountability and
transparency in public functioning, as it
specifically provides for hefty fines and
disciplinary action against
erring officials. The act becomes even more
relevant as the government has planned a huge
employment-generation program estimated to cost
more than US$40 billion per year to be implemented
at the behest of public functionaries across the
country.
The act covers a wide range of
information defined as "any material in any form
including records, documents, memos, e-mails,
opinions, advices, press releases, circulars,
orders, log books, contracts, reports, papers,
samples, models, data material held in any
electronic form and information relating to any
private body which can be accessed by a public
authority under any other law for the time-being
in force."
The most potent aspect is the
"provision of penalty" to ensure that government
officials and all public authorities provide high
priority to requests for information from
citizens. Deterrent penalties have been prescribed
for failure to provide information in time,
refusing to accept application for information,
giving incorrect, incomplete or misleading
information or destroying information. The act,
however, exempts security and intelligence
organizations. The act places India among 55
countries that have such a legislation.
It
may be recalled that India ranks among the
most-corrupt nations in the world. Studies by the
Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) and
other indices such as the Corruption Perception
Index have consistently ranked India as one of the
worst as far as corrupt practices go. In the
latest TI report, India secured a lowly spot at
number 88 (out of 159 countries surveyed) of the
most corrupt places on the planet, along with
unlikely companion countries such as Gabon, Mali,
Moldova, Tanzania and Iran.
The World Bank
has labeled Delhi Development Authority, which
oversees urban housing and commercial property in
the national capital, as the most corrupt
organization in India. The list of scams involving
public servants, politicians, private businesses
and individuals is an unending one -
tehelka (bribe for party funds and defense
deals), telgi (spurious stamp paper),
fodder scam (embezzlement of funds for animal
husbandry), coffin scam (purchase of coffins for
dead soldiers), petrol-pump allotment scam,
stock-market scam, have each been highlighted by
the media. Yet, hardly does one corruption scandal
die when another one surfaces.
There is a
known mafia that controls tenders for railways,
roads, power projects, electricity and
property-development with any outside or new
entrant into this closed field often met with
brutal resistance. The case of Satyendra Dubey
still rankles - Dubey was an engineer killed when
he tried to expose the mafia that controls the
national highway-development project. Apart from
corruption at the institutional level, individual
greasing of palms is required to procure a driving
license, electricity or water connection,
clearance of a residential plan, marriage, birth
and death certificates, passport, lodging a report
with the police ... the list goes on.
According to a recent report by
International Finance Corporation (IFC), the
investment arm of the World Bank, India has the
"most bureaucratic red tape" in the South Asian
region. "It [India] scores worst in time to
register a business (89 days), difficulty of
firing a worker (90 out of 100), delay in
registering property (67 days), time for closing a
business (10 years)," says the IFC's report "Doing
Business in South Asia in 2005".
Further,
India ranks second in the region for procedures
and time required to enforce a contract, the
report says. It takes three months to open a
business in Mumbai. Two of the months are spent
obtaining a personal account number from the
income-tax department.
There have been
various attempts to put a figure to the dimension
of corruption: government loss of $50 billion due
to tax evasion; $10 billion due to delay in
projects due to bureaucratic red tape; the former
prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, said that for every
rupee spent by the government for development,
less than a tenth of the amount actually reaches
the beneficiary, and this too is an exaggerated
figure. A recent survey suggests police officials
across the country earn more than $400 million
through bribes offered by truck drivers.
Corruption has been defined by the World
Bank as the "use of public office for private
profit". The former chief vigilance commissioner
of India, N Vittal, said there are five major
players on the corruption scene, interdependent,
strengthening and supportive of the vicious cycle.
They are the corrupt politician, bureaucrat,
businessman, non-governmental organization and
underworld criminal.
"A shortage of basic
decent human life in India has forced a common
person to be corrupt," Vittal said. "It is
impossible for a common man to own a roof, provide
good education to his children and hope for a
peaceful retirement in India using normal and
honest means."
"One has to bribe someone to
get a good education, to get a deserving job and
to avail services which one is entitled to as
being a citizen of India. A low GDP growth for two
decades and explosive population growth in the
last 50 years has brought corruption to every
sphere of life in India. With such a huge
population and massive government control,
everything seem to be in short supply."
This is not to say mechanisms are not
being put in place and continuously upgraded to
fight corrupt practices. The Indian judiciary,
even if very slow and inefficient, does take on an
important role from time to time, delivering as
well as exhorting both private and government
players to mind their businesses well in the
public interest; the Indian media is vibrant and
continually highlights instances of aberrant
behavior of politicians, bureaucrats as well as
private business concerns; vigilance and tax
departments raid people with assets beyond their
known sources of income; consumer courts have
become active and take on cases on behalf of the
harassed individuals; computerization as well as
introduction of competition in many spheres of
activity controlled by the government has brought
about transparency as well as an attitude of
service to the consumer/customer first.
The earlier assumption that the big fish
invariably gets away has been debunked even as the
media and the courts come down heavily on aberrant
politicians and public servants. Yet, the enduring
feeling is that corruption is inherent in our
systems, and it is better to abide by it than try
to beat it.
An editorial in the Times of
India has rejected the IFC finding that the
bureaucracy in Pakistan or China may be more
business-friendly than in India. "Non-democratic
states are by definition adhocracies run not on
principles of social equity and respect for law
but on the whims of the ruling elite. The very
fact that democratic India has codified norms for
doing business is a guarantee for fair-trade
practice, which can't arbitrarily be
short-circuited by all-powerful vested interests."
It is in this context that the RTI is
being looked as a leap toward cleansing the
functioning of public officials, though there is
still a long way to go as the Indian bureaucracy
is notorious for finding ways and means for its
pecuniary survival. There are reports of
government officials already looking at the
creation of another mesh of information officers
across the country. The RTI has clauses and
exceptions that can provide an escape route, but
there is no doubt the government official
(referred to as the babu) is going to be
facing some heat, for once.
Apart from
putting institutional processes in place to check
corruption, ultimately getting rid of the malaise
of corruption is about attitude and the moral
fiber of a society. A basic respect for human
values and dignity is the only long-term solution.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New
Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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