The long road to corruption-free India!

Transparency International - an international NGO monitoring global corruption - placed India at the 80th position among a list of 180 countries in terms of corruption.

Hyderabad: After leading India to independence from British rule, Mahatma Gandhi wanted to eliminate corruption. Indira Gandhi astonished everyone when she declared that no place is free of corruption, and she was probably right. Even the Supreme Court has lamented that nobody has been able to take measures against corruption despite tall claims.

The extent of bribes and pay-offs have reached an uncontrollable level.

A few years ago, an extensive study was carried out to find out the number of bribes being paid by truck drivers to government officials in Ludhiana, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Mumbai, Kolkata, Vijayawada, Bengaluru and Chennai, which revealed that these bribes amounted to Rs. 22,000 crore.

This study was done by a non-profit organization called 'Save Life Foundation' which collected this information from the ten major transport zones in India and the abstract report was released by the Minister of State for Road Transport, VK Singh.

The summary of the report read that the amount of bribes that the truck drivers pay to traffic police and various departments of transport officials, has now reached Rs. 48,000 crores. 97.5 percent of the drivers from Guwahati, 89 from Chennai and 84.4 from Delhi who participated in the survey, agreed to have paid bribes.

Bengaluru ranked first among other Indian cities in terms of RTO officials’ corruption, as per the study. 93 percent of Mumbai’s population agreed to have bribed the RTO officials for obtaining their driving license.

It seems that the blight of corruption is impacting all sections of society.

It is an open secret that check posts across India have been notorious for collecting bribes before the advent of GST. After the launch of GST amidst a campaign to wipe out corruption, the check posts have been kept in check but the RTO check posts are still thriving on pay-offs.

According to another recent estimate, the minimum amount that a truck has to pay during its entire commute is Rs. 1,257. These small sums combined together will account for nearly half of the annual GST revenue. These numbers are proof enough to show the magnitude of corruption.

The illegal practise of bribes and pay-offs are not limited to the Indian roadways alone.

The India Corruption Survey, 2019 revealed that Rajasthan had topped the list of most corrupt states, followed by Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana and Karnataka. Andhra Pradesh ranked 13 on this list.

Several departments like revenue, municipal, medical, energy and Panchayat Raj are mired with corruption in many states. Few studies have confirmed that over a decade ago, one-third of the Telugu poor had to spend Rs. 900 crore annually in order to get medical and educational services.

The Anti-Corruption Bureau reports are calling out the peril of corruption from time to time. While many of the corruption cases do not come to a conclusion, those caught taking bribes can end up getting promoted to significant posts within no time.

However, there have been some exceptions as well.

Organisations like 'Transparency International' have confirmed that police bribery is the highest in the Asia Pacific region. They also mentioned that India had paced ahead of countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in terms of taking bribes.

India ranks 80th among the 180 countries surveyed on the basis of corruption. Government departments and officials have been relentlessly working towards making India a front-runner in corruption. What is the remedy to this unrelenting expansion of corruption?

As the former President KR Narayanan exclaimed, there is a need to launch another freedom struggle to put an end to corruption. Bribery is going unperturbed even in computerised offices equipped with surveillance cameras.

There must be a regulatory mechanism in place to check the income and assets of government employees right from the time of joining the service until the time of their retirement. There should be a threat perception in place for the government officials that would make them feel that taking bribes would lead to dire consequences. In addition to this, political interruption in government offices must be stopped once and for all.