Corruption, India ishtyle*
Oh no! Another guy talking, just talking and doing nothing about corruption.
*ishtyle: Slang for style in ‘Indian’.
As i was packing my bags, ready to fly to the US for my masters, I got a call from the national bank I had taken a loan from. The manager tells me that I need to hand over a mortgage agreement and do it at the earliest. After turning to varied sources from the internet to relatives on where and how I can acquire this document, I landed at the local government office. Surprisingly, the officer saw me immediatly. I explained what I needed and why, and he heard me very patiently. At the end of it all, he says “Don’t worry. It will be done. You just need to bring two people as guarantors who can sign for you. They cannot be related to you. They will have to be here for a couple of hours and sign on a piece of paper and that’s it”. Now, in the middle of a working day, how do I find two people who are not even related to me, to come and wait at a government office for two hours? As I got up and walked back to the stairs, a friendly gentleman who had been watching all this approached and asked what I needed. I told him and he said he can do it for me but it will cost me. I had no option but to ‘happily’ agree. Yes, happily because I had to hand over that document to the bank for the loan to be disbursed and I was flying in two weeks! For a ‘under-the-table’ charge of Rs.1500($23), the document was made available to me in 30min. Two employees in the very government office, who have not seen me before, were my guarantors. The same officer I had met, had attested the document without even reading it. when I tried to bargain with the tout, he told me how he has to pay a majority to the officer and some more to the guarantors and he gets to keep less that 1/3rd the amount. It did not matter as I got what I wanted an was on my way. And this is not the first time I have paid a bribe, only the most recent.
Oh! We indians are used to it. ipaidabribe.com is a a crowdsourced website which encourages people to report a bribe that they have paid as an attempt to document everyday corruption and analyse its cost to the society. The figures show that the 98,102 instances of reported corruption have cost Rs 2872.98 crore rupees($428 million). And these are only the ones reported on this particular website. Imagine that!
Corruption is a wicked problem. Wicked in the evil or morally wrong sense, and wicked in the problem being convulated and impossible to solve. The fact that tackling it has been on the agenda for every political party and not giving-in to it on the mind of every citizen, but still nothing has come out of it speaks a lot. No I am not complaining. i have been guilty(not really) of paying bribes on multiple occasions. The system is a spider’s web and has been designed, or atleast modified by the people in such a way that more you try to resist it, more you get entangled.
India’s relationship status with corruption on facebook would read, ‘It’s complicated’.
The fact that corruption is present at multiple levels in numerous ways makes it impossible to solve. Who is to blame? Will the problem be resolved if all corrupt officials were suspended? I don’t think so. Somewhere, we Indians(people with a reasonable amount of money) have started liking corruption. That might sound harsh but it is true. More often that not, government procedures require a number of documnets and endless hours of standing in a queue. Some of these documents have to be collected from another government office. The rules, the processes, they keep changing. It’s almost as if the system has been made so complex that it is impossible for the common man to understand, which leave him no option but to partake in corruption. So, the lawmakers(politicians) have to be held responsible, right? If only it was that easy. As we go higher in the hierarchy, corruption becomes more and more prevalent, but tougher to take notice of. There has to be someone who can do something about this, right? People have tried.
In 2011, social activist Anna Hazare started the Indian anti-corruption movement and sat on a hunger strike in the country’s capital. The movement led to citizens across the country take notice of the situation. There were nation wide protests and calls for major reforms. The primary aim of the movement was to remove corruption in the Indian government by passing the Jan Lokpal bill, also knows as the Citizen’s Ombudsman bill. The bill wanted that a non-government, activist led organization take charge of any and every complaint of corruption by the common man. The movement gathered steam and media from all over the country and the world were focussed on it. It was named among the ‘Top 10 news stories of 2011’ by Time magazine. Arvind Kejriwal played a primary role in the movement as an aide to Anna Hazare. However, all his ideas did not match with that of Anna and he eventually opened his own political party as he thought it would be best to tackle corruption by getting into the system(Anna wanted to stay outside of politics and tackle corruption). He even went on to contest the Delhi state elections, going on to win and become the Chief minister of the state. In a little more than a month, after being unable to still pass the bill, he resigned. That speaks a lot about the state of corruption in India. The surprising fact is that the bill has been introduced in the parliament 11 times since 1968, but never passed.
The police! That’s who we can go to to make any complaints against corruption, right? Wrong! Policemen involved in bribery seems to be the most rampant as it directly affects the citizens. But, did you know that even they have to pay a bribe to enter police services in the first place? Irony! It’s all one big vicious circle that has no end. Over the years, the magnitude has only increased with organizations like the army being affected. Even sports has not been spared. The amount of money involved has only been increasing, upwards of thousands of crores. Will it all end? It will. When? Sometime in the future. How long? Depends. Depends on what? On many many things. Will it really end? It wi..
