Comment Pieces

UNCAC and India

Summary:India ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption, 2005 in May 2011.  This was seen as a catalyst in furthering India’s efforts towards fighting corruption. However, it is important to understand its various provisions and relevance to India’s corruption scenario

In May this year, India finally ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). This was indeed a significant step in furthering India’s fight against corruption and in supporting the international community’s efforts to increase transparency and accountability. The UNCAC is the first legally binding international anti-corruption instrument; an effective tool to address the increasingly global nature of corruption. For corruption, which is an endemic issue that many countries are grappling with, the UNCAC attempts to cover the ambiguous areas by putting forth various provisions that, in theory, participating countries should follow. But this legislation in itself will not be successful if every State Signatory does not initiate reforms and steps towards enforcing stronger anti-corruption regulations and policies.

In the recent past, after the uncovering of various scams and scandals authored by A Raja and Suresh Kalmadi, the country witnessed a series of protests and public outcry as the civil society strongly expressed the need to institute a robust anti-corruption enforcement -- the Lokpal. Time and again, the Lokpal has been touted as the final solution to India’s corruption problem. But this legislation also needs to be supplemented by parallel reforms, which are important steps in tackling graft.

Talking about reforms, it would be interesting to first look at what is recognised as corruption in India. The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 which is the primer to corruption recognises the following as corrupt acts:

• The taking of gratification by public servants other than legal remuneration for performance of an official act.
• Criminal misconduct by public servants, which includes abuse of office to deliver a pecuniary advantage to oneself or any other person.

The following table explores this definition as against the internationally accepted definitions of corruption:

Corruption, as defined and recognised by India, is limited to bribery of public sector officials i.e. the government officials. There is no doubt that it is a very narrow definition and reinforces the need for India to align its existing policies and laws in line with internationally accepted standards of defining corruption.  Unless India takes steps in enlarging the scope and definition of what constitutes corruption, the existing ambiguous laws give way to a lot of grey areas, facilitating numerous other acts of corruption. The UNCAC’s action plan puts forth a global blueprint for tacking corruption. Ratification of this convention being the first step, it is now critical that India translates the same by implementing stronger reforms. And enlarging the definition of corruption should be a starting point in this direction.

Amidst all this activism against corruption, one observes that all the noise and outcry has been limited to the bureaucracy and the public sector while there has been a long standing silence with regards to corruption in the private sector and by non-state actors like multinational corporations and corporate entities. India is a growing economy. Newer business opportunities are being created not just in the domestic sector but also in the trans-national sector. With big ticket scams and scandals being exposed, corruption has been a major concern for global corporations around their investments in India.

A recent surveyundertaken by the Swedish Embassy, Swedish Trade Council and Swedish Chamber of Commerce India reported that bureaucracy and corruption are the major roadblocks to business in India. It’s time for India to initiate all-inclusive anti-graft laws and make its anti-corruption stand well known internationally. A standing testimony to this exercise is the United Kingdom, who came out strongly against corruption by implementing the UK Bribery Act, 2010.

The implementation of the proposed Lokpal Bill and strengthening existing investigating agencies such as the Central Vigilance Committee and the Central Bureau of Investigation will, no doubt, catalyse arrest and help in booking corrupt officials. But they do not guarantee the recovery of illegal assets and huge sums of money amassed by the guilty.  Be it Raja or Kalmadi, while they serve their sentence, questions around their assets and money amassed by illicit means continue to hover in debates on corruption, thereby emphasizing the need to have an effective Asset Recovery mechanism in place. No anti-corruption enforcement is complete if the million and trillion dollars’ worth of assets and cash cannot be recovered. The next important action that our law-makers and policy-makers must initiate is an efficient Asset Recovery mechanism.

With India having ratified the UNCAC, there must now be changes in its national laws; also frameworks capable of combating corruption across both public and private sectors must be adopted. Standing in solidarity with the international community, the nation needs to fast-track the enforcement and implementation of laws and policies to fight corruption.