India Should Build Anti-Corruption Defences | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.

India Should Build Anti-Corruption Defences

Scheme of the Essay

Exposition: India is listed as the most corrupt country. Rising Action: We can have non-corrupt organisations.

Climax:

(1) The level of corruption depends on the values or morals of a society.

(2) Blaming systemic failure for market scam is an eye wash.

(3) For building a defence against corruption (a) official secret Act should be replaced (b) education should be widespread. (c) remove scarcity of products and services (d) Archaic laws should be changed.

Ending: Judicial Activism is an effective method

Transparency International of Germany has listed India as the ninth most corrupt country. Perhaps we are a very corrupt society by tradition. Can we ever have clean organisations in such a society?

Yes, we can clean and non-corrupt organisations. Calcutta is not very clean, but every Calcuttan takes pride in the cleanliness of the Metro railway. Building a less corrupt or corruption free systems need a positive approach.

The level of corruption depends on the values and morals of a society. In any population about ten per cent will be honest by nature and ten per cent always dishonest. The remaining eighty percent will be moulded by the social environment?

The blame for the stock market scam was laid on ‘systemic failure.’ But the system was designed by the bureaucracy and political leadership. Explaining away scams by invoking the mystic and mythical systemic failure is an eyewash.

That brings us to the issue of designing corruption free systems. The stock market scam occurred because there was a manual system in the Public Debt Office of the RBI which gave a 15-day float. This was exploited by Harshad Mehta and his friends.

The prime minister of Singapore says if civil servants are paid only peanuts, we will get only monkeys as civil servants. India, eternally short of resources, can never afford to pay more for the civil servants.

Designing a defensive system needs a look into the root of corruption. One such root is lack of transparency. If the Official Secrets Act is replaced by a Freedom of Information Act, it will help in accessing information. Part of the bureaucracy’s power over the public stems from its access to information. In the heyday of the licence-permit raj, the liaison men were engaged in finding information.

To introduce transparency, apart from Freedom of Information Act, there should also be a general effort at educating the public about their rights. The Centre has recently taken the initiative to frame a citizen’s charter. What is needed is that every citizen should know from each government body what types of service he can get, when and how.

The second root of corruption is scarcity. The scandals on housing, gas connections or telephones relate to the scarcity of product and services. This can be tackled by designing appropriate rules and regulations. For example, the National Telecom Policy 1994, if implemented in the right spirit, should have by now created a telephone-on-demand situation. Similarly, the severe housing shortage in cities is from the combined effect of the Rent Control Act and the Urban Land Ceiling Act. About 100,000 flats in Bombay are reportedly kept under lock and key because the owners dare not let out the premises.

The third root of corruption is red tape. Bribe is treated as speed money. The entrepreneur’s budget for this in their pre-operative and pre-project expenses. Much scope for red tape can be removed if we do business process reengineering, and make the system transparent and simple.

Since the vested in tersest are unwilling to change the system, the force has to come from outside. Industry, trade associations and voluntary agencies should come up with proposals about simplifying systems.

There can be a widespread debate that demystifies the governmental process and builds in a public opinion for speedy decision making. It is said that human beings are rational but they do the rational thing only after trying everything else.

The fourth root of corruption is the archaic laws. Shakespeare pointed out in Measure for Measure that laws are like scarecrows, set up to scare birds. Once birds realise that the scarecrow is lifeless, they build their nets on it. We should adopt the principle of sunset laws, as in the US, across our legal system. Then there will be pressure for reviewing laws and finding out whether they need to be on the statute book.

There is always a tendency to retain some archaic laws as they may come in handy for harassing a person. Making laws up to date by building in a sunset principle will ensure that this part of the system is not prone to corruption.

Thanks to the various judgements of courts and administrative tribunals, the corrupt in our system get much protection. There are so many cushions of protection for the corrupt. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. Many such cushions have been the result of good intentions being exploited by the corrupt.

In fact, we can adopt from Singapore, the physical punishment of lashes to set an example. However mighty the corrupt person may be, the fear of public lashing may be an effective deterrent. None can delegate this punishment to another.

When the law brings people under its purview, the powerful want to escape the clutches of the law by amending the law. The present description of the FERA as a draconian law and attempts to amend it is an example. Another example is the debate about providing an escape route to MPs and MLAS from the anticorruption Act.

Now comes the question, how to implement these reforms. Perhaps voluntary agencies or consumer activist groups can come up with model laws and mould public opinion. Perhaps some changes can be forced through judicial activism. Merely complaining that scams are the result of systemic failure is no excuse.