Harsh Mander explores the impact
of corruption on the lives of the citizens
and makes suggestions to counter it.
Given that corruption is rampant in the
public sector, an important question that
arises relates to the impact of such
corruption and whom it affects the most.
While the negative impact of corruption is
an oft-discussed topic the fact that it is
the poorest and most marginalized section of
society that bear the brunt of corruption
has not been adequately recognized.
An important impact of corruption is the
misdirection of public investments.
Decisions related to them are less
influenced by considerations of public
authority than by opportunities for
corruption. This occurs in two ways. One is
the misdirection of funds in favour of
large, centralized and complex projects
rather than dispersed decentralized
programmes. This allows large-scale leakages
as graft and commissions as against projects
requiring less financial resources.
Decentralized and dispersed schemes, where
the mechanisms for vigilance and detection
are weak, provide another avenue for such
leakages, albeit at a smaller level: for
example, in village-level infrastructure
works undertaken by contractors. As a
result, while public expenditure is
seemingly made on development projects, much
of it goes into the pockets of opportunist
intermediaries. This is of great
significance in India where, despite 50
years of investment in the welfare and
development of marginalized sections, a
large proportion of this population
continues to remain in the clutches of
poverty and is denied basic necessities.
Further, goods and services provided by the
government in the name of development and
welfare are, in fact, only illegally
available at a price. Critical rights to
land, shelter or natural resources are
affirmed only if and when recorded by the
state, mostly at a price. Thus, the
distribution of these goods and services is
severely biased against those who do not
have the capacity to pay. These are
precisely the people for whom these
programmes are, in theory, designed to
provide a social safety net.
Corruption in fiscal management and
collection also militates against the
poorest, because they have less power and
influence to evade both direct and indirect
tax burdens. It may be argued that the
really poor may not be taxpayers per se, but
they bear a disproportionate share of the
burden of indirect taxes and of the
inflationary impacts of fiscal profligacy.
In many ways, the poor actually subsidize
the rich.
There is also irony in the fact that
although large industry has substantially
deregulated, small and petty producers
continue to grapple with mindless controls,
very few of which have been dismantled.
Deregulation has made almost no impact at
the district and village levels. For
instance, according to the laws in Orissa,
only the leaseholder, the Tribal Development
Cooperative Corporation and its traders can
process hill brooms (a type of grass). The
tribals (one of the most marginalized
sections of society) can collect the grass
but cannot bind it into brooms, nor can they
store or sell the collected grass in the
open market. The poor are thus prevented
both from value addition through processing
and storage, as well as the right to get the
best price for their produce. Similar
restrictions exist in several states of the
country.
The same unrealistic legal and policy
structure militates against much of the
informal sector in towns and cities. In most
parts of India there are almost no legal
means for someone who is very poor to secure
access to land for shelter or livelihood.
Survival and work are therefore forced into
the outer fringes of illegality, which
renders the urban poor constantly vulnerable
to extortion by various arms of the
regulatory administration.
The poor, even without corruption, are
greatly disadvantaged in any interface with
the state due to their economic, social and
political powerlessness. However, corruption
by state authorities further intensifies
this inherent powerlessness.
Causes of corruption
Corruption is a symptom of the collapse of
the institutions of governance that are
supposed to manage the relationship between
citizens and the state. The legitimacy of
the state is related to its responsibilities
for ensuring the allocation of scarce
resources, in accordance with principles of
justice, for development, for the protection
and welfare of the disadvantaged, for
sustainable management of natural resources
and for ensuring the rule of law, peace and
security. Corruption represents the
subversion of these state responsibilities
for the enrichment and aggrandisement of
public servants.
The opportunities to be corrupt are fostered
by several systemic features of the
bureaucracy. These include lack of
transparency, accessibility and
accountability, cumbersome and confusing
procedures, proliferation of mindless
controls and a lack of reward and punishment
system. Not only has the state expanded to
intervene in every aspect of a citizen's
life, the degree of discretion available to
public servants is also very large and does
not require them to be accountable to the
citizen. Rules and procedures are complex,
poorly defined and disseminated, and prone
to change at short notice, subjecting the
client public to inordinate delays and
exploitation by public servants and touts.
These problems are further aggravated by the
absence of effective professional sanctions
in the civil services. The fact that
systemic awards are not linked to integrity
and the extremely low probability of
detection or punishment makes corruption an
activity with low risk and high return.
The social acceptability of corruption and
the growth of consumerist values lend
further support to bureaucratic corruption.
Today, society has tacitly granted social
legitimacy to corruption in every sphere.
This allows the corrupt to throw restraint
to the winds and flaunt their illegal wealth
through lavish lifestyles and conspicuous
consumption, grotesquely disproportionate to
all legitimate and known sources of income.
Supporting this is the burgeoning of
consumerist values fostered by seductive
advertising, especially on the electronic
media, in a permissive environment created
by the debunking of restraints imposed in
the past by the stated socialist goals of
official policy. There is an increasing
unwillingness amongst civil servants to feel
satisfied with a prestigious vocation,
albeit at a salary that guarantees no more
than a middle class existence. This sharp
imbalance between means and aspirations
fuels corruption, especially of the grey and
packaged kind.
* * * *
Conclusion
In India, corruption amongst public
authorities is both pervasive and systemic.
Symptomatic of a collapse of the
institutions of governance and representing
serious distortions of the state mechanisms
for ensuring equity, development, justice
and order, it is rooted in an erosion of
social values and lack of transparency and
accountability in the Indian state
machinery.
As a parliamentary democracy with periodic
elections, a constitution that guarantees
its citizens the freedom of speech and
expression (amongst other fundamental
rights), annual reporting requirements,
publication of information and
administrative law requirements, the Indian
state is designed to promote accountability
to the people and transparency of
functioning. However, the practice is far
removed from the theory.
An over-expanded state, multiplicity and
complexity of rules and procedures,
centralized, 'expert'-dominated and opaque
policy-making and the continued existence of
colonial laws, have all contributed to the
creation of a culture of secrecy, distance
and mystification within the bureaucracy,
not fundamentally different from the
colonial times. In summary, the lack of
bureaucratic transparency and accountability
contributes, in large measure, to the growth
of public corruption. While the impact of
corruption tends to be debilitating for all
citizens, the major brunt of this vice is
borne by the weakest and most marginalized.
It is in such an environment that civil
society's movement for the right to
information plays such a significant role.
By seeking to give citizens an enforceable
right to question, examine, audit, review
and assess government acts and decisions,
and to ensure that these are consistent with
the principles of public interest, probity
and justice, it seeks to significantly
expand citizens' democratic space. By giving
all citizens further opportunity to
participate in the political process in a
more full way, it seeks to enhance the
quality of participatory political
democracy. The cumulative impact of the
availability of such information to citizens
would be to check corruption and the
arbitrary exercise of state power.
On the one hand, the Indian state provides a
large space for corruption to take root. On
the other, it also periodically provides the
space for progressive elements within the
state to institutionalize mechanisms to
control corruption. These range from
anti-corruption laws to pro-people
administrative reforms. However, these
efforts have been patchy and inadequate. In
most cases ordinary citizens are relatively
unaware of such measures. Where they are
aware, fear of retaliation makes people
unwilling to exercise their right to enforce
them. In the case of the right to
information, government efforts have
consisted of periodically trying to modify
the Official Secrets Act. But the efforts
have been largely cosmetic and designed to
maintain the control of public authorities
on public information. As a result,
government measures have failed to have the
desired effect on corruption.
It is in this context that the intervention
by the civil society organization MKSS gains
significance. First, it challenges the
non-existence of legislation on the right to
information. Second, it points out and
challenges inadequacies and loopholes in the
legislation that has been enacted by the
Rajasthan government. In the process, it
also confronts and challenges direct and
indirect attempts to subvert the enactment
of an effective legislation by vested
interests within the bureaucracy.
Direct attempts include hindering jan sun
wais and refusing to provide the information
necessary to carry out such hearings.
Indirect efforts include the enactment of a
legislation allowing people to 'inspect'
documents on local development works but not
giving them the right to 'photocopy' such
documents (in order to prevent initiation of
recovery proceedings against corrupt
officials) and preventing changes in
sections of existing legislation like the
Official Secrets Act that are contradictory
to such a right. To fight the attempts by
vested interests within the bureaucracy to
obstruct the right to information MKSS has
joined hands with progressive elements
within society as well as in the
bureaucracy.
While institutionalizing such rights is
important in terms of giving people the
legal basis to fight corruption directly, it
is not a sufficient condition to check
corruption. Only through the proactive
exercise of this right by the people can
corruption be checked. In the final
instance, civil society helps to mobilize
people in order to help them exercise their
right to information in an effective manner.
The impact of jan sunwais is
multidimensional. At one level, it helps to
break the passivity of the ordinary citizens
accustomed to being powerless victims,
enabling them to directly confront
corruption.
By reading out in a public meeting the names
of officials involved and the amounts
embezzled by them through falsely reporting
payment of wages, MKSS helps to make
corruption a personal experience for the
villagers. In turn, this provides the
impetus for a collective demand for
immediate redress through repayment of the
misappropriated amount. As a result,
misappropriation of public funds is checked
and state authorities are made more
accountable to the people in whose name
development programmes of the state are
legitimized. Public condemnation of
corruption helps to reduce the social
legitimacy accorded to it. Finally, MKSS is,
if only in part, responsible for initiating
efforts to bring in a comprehensive
legislation on the right to information
along with changes in the Official Secrets
Act.
By enabling marginalized people to fight
against corruption, the movement for the
right to information seeks a momentous
enlargement of their space and strength in
relation to the structures of the state. In
short, it proves that an active, vigilant
and assertive citizenry is the most reliable
and sustainable barrier to corruption.
Rajesh Tandon is
the president of PRIA, an NGO working for
development in India. He is the author of
Participatory ResearchRanjita Mohanty is
head of the research programme of PRIA. She
is author of Civil Society and Governance.
Harsh Mander is a social activist, writer
and former civil servant and is currently
the director of Action Aid, India. He is the
author of Forgotten Voices.
The modern state is increasingly capable of
dominating the social, political and
economic spheres of an individual's and
community's life. This intrusion and the
consequent infringement on freedom have
raised questions about the legitimate
boundaries of state power. This volume
explores civil society initiatives which
address and impact on issues of good
governance. |
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