CORRUPTION IN INDIA AND ITS SOLUTION

Corruption in India is but a by-product of deeper malaise, the chalta hai attitude and its innovative twin jugaad. Every shortcut we take compromises a principle, corrodes an institution and sets a wrong precedent, says Shashi Shekhar. Broadly speaking, the major areas of corruption in India are political, bureaucratic, corporate and individual corruption. According to the 2005 study conducted by Transparency International in India, results revealed that more than 55% Indians are corrupt. India features right at the top in the list for black money in the entire world with almost US$ one and half thousand billion in Swiss banks in the form of black money. In accordance with the data provided by the Swiss Banking Association Report (2006), India has more black money than the rest of the world combined. The recent scams involving unimaginably big sums of money, such as the 2G spectrum scam, are pretty well known. It is estimated that about 80% of Indians earn less than 2$ per day and every second child is malnourished. It seems as if only the honest people are poor in India and want to get rid of their poverty by education, emigration to cities, and immigration, whereas all the corrupt ones are getting rich through scams and crime. It seems as though as our motherland India is a rich country filled with poor people. Before writing this down, a coutwo questions struck my mind -- How did we get here (state of corruption in India) and how do we get out of it (the solutions)? Having already written much about the first lets address the latter one: Corruption in India defies most solutions. Such is the level of corruption in this land of a billion. Hence, there are no quick-fix solutions to the deep malaise of corruption. Corruption and its fallouts can be reduced only when an adequate anti-corruption strategy is made effective through strong political and bureaucratic will, something of the sort of the Jan Lokpal Bill. But for all this the root causes of corruption first need to be diagnosed, and then eliminated or minimized. The root causes of bureaucratic corruption in the case of India and a few other Asian countries (Indonesia and Hong Kong) basically originate from opportunities geared by the involvement of civil servants in the administration control, and final disposal of lucrative activities, disproportionate salaries, and weak and ineffective policing in terms of detection and the consequent punishments. We should aim at changing the public perception of corruption as a low-risk, high-reward' activity to a high-risk, low-reward' activity. We need to be united and determined in our endeavor to combat corruption, given the various legislations and its legal structure. We just need to be ensure, that there is proper unbiased execution of the various anti-corruption acts to take strong and prompt legal action against the offenders, irrespective of their political/bureaucratic connections, and money or muscle power and to bring the guilty to the book.