Recent events surrounding the allocation of 2G and other suspected scams have dampened the mood of the nation. Initial shock followed the expos? involving the Radia tapes. Now the question uppermost in the minds of people is as to whether we can ever come out of this cleansed, and start anew. First we must take the bull by the horns and understand the nature of the beast.
Corruption is not new to India. After Independence, Gandhiji was to comment on its increasing presence in the face of the opening up of democracy. ?Corruption and hypocrisy? he maintained, ?should not be inevitable products of democracy?. Today, it is equally important that corruption not be an inevitable product of liberalisation. Recent events have led to a feeling that unethical and undue influence have been wielded by the corporate sector in many of the unfolding scams. This is partly justified. Liberalisation did not speedily and satisfactorily introduce mechanisms to address fast-changing scenarios and to dispel either policy vagueness or weak regulatory and legal frameworks. There was a transparency deficit in rule-making, which left a fertile field of discretion open for crony capitalism to flourish.
Second, it is important to note that corruption flourishes in other and completely different scenarios. In 2007, a definitive and national study revealed the extent of bribes paid by below poverty level (BPL ) households for publicly provided services. Transparency International and the Centre of Media studies documented that a third of BPL households paid a bribe in the previous year to get five ?basic services? (PDS, hospital, school education, electricity and water supply) and six ?need based services? (NREGS, land records/registration, forest, housing, banking and police). Those failing to pay bribes or to get a contact went without the service. It is quite believable that the police was the single largest bribed agency, with 48% of BPL households reporting having paid a bribe to the police.
How equipped are we to address these dismal realities, and what are the impacts of corrupt institutions that are at the heart of our democracy? Fortunately, India is as much a work in progress as it is in regress.
In this dark hour, democracy in part has shown that it works. Political parties? accusations against each other have provided a fairly robust recap of wrongdoing, to jolt public memory and to keep the pressure on. The CWG scam, the fodder scam, the Bofors scandal, the Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parikh financial scams, the Yeddyurappa and the Adarsh Society land scams, etc, have all found mention during defending discourses. An anxious Prime Minister, while in Berlin, spoke about his ?worry? over the future of the parliamentary system itself. Not surprising. There has been steadily declining indices of parliamentary participation since 1956. This winter session drove this trend to the ground with productive use of time being only 5% for the Lok Sabha and 2% for the Rajya Sabha. It will be a tight rope walk to ensure that the necessary parliamentary voices against corruption will not threaten the very functioning of the institution of Parliament.
The ensuing roles played by the media have also been complex. Media has teetered precariously in taking on justice roles and breaching privacy propriety. On the other hand, it has not spared its own. It has pitted media against media, judges against judges, courts against courts and politicians against politicians. This kind of catharsis in many cases brought out the fact that a fine line had been crossed. Questions of personal ethics, probity and values have now found their way back to the national consciousness and centrestage, like never before. The challenge will be to sustain this awakening in professional life and to inculcate it in ?generation next?.
Many other institutions and mechanisms meant to halt the spread of corruption are in place, but are still a work in progress. The watchdog institution of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), for instance, has directed focus on many recent scams. However it has also described its own right to information as being weaker than that of the ordinary citizens, and forewarned of new situations and players like PPPs and regulators who are outside the preview of its audits. Remedying this is a draft bill, whose hearing was temporarily drowned as it was scheduled for the doomed winter session of Parliament. Other watchdog institutions, as recent alleged scams suggest, are themselves in need of watchdogs.
Bottom-up mechanisms are also still a work in progress. The feared Right to Information Act (RTI) still gives a runaround to petitioners. A government-initiated survey in 2009 found that despite several gains, over 75% of RTI information seekers were not satisfied with the quality of information provided.
Value changes don?t come easily. All these mechanisms must coalesce in the right direction. Getting corruption out of the system will have to run like a campaign. Things like the Vohra committee corruption report and the police reforms have been buried too long. The aam lok will have to go beyond voting and support civic engagement at a larger level and bring personal leadership roles into push for this change to occur. It will not be easy when you step out of your home or workplace to ask and follow up as to why a perfectly good pavement is being dug up for a second time. But this will count in the long run. Otherwise, the next scam will be round the corner.
The writer is a development specialist and author