The panacea for corruption
India has ranked 95th in the Corruption Perception Index, 2011, making the case stronger for tougher anti-corruption enforcements and reforms.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2011 has ranked India 95th out of a total of 183 countries that were surveyed. The Wall Street Journalreports India’s score of 3.1 on a scale from zero to 10, where anything below five is bad news. India has been sailing on the corruption wave with big ticket scams like the Commonwealth Games, the 2G telecom scam, and everyday transactional cases of corruption hitting our shores.
Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement captivated the entire country and channelized citizens’ anger into action, catalysing conversation around the need for reforms and stronger anti-corruption enforcements. The Lokpal Bill was touted as ‘the’ solution for tackling and eliminating the corruption menace. But whether Lokpal is the magic potion to eradicate corruption has been the subject of endless debates and discussions. Are other feeder and parallel reforms needed along with the proposed Lokpal?As these questions continue to hover on the horizon, it is important to look at the need for various reforms and how they would act as an efficient tool in arresting corruption.
The Lokpal Bill has garnered huge support not just from civil society organisations, academicians and the intelligentsia but also from citizens who strongly see the difference, this proposed, single legislation can bring about in rooting out corruption. While opinions and viewpoints ranging across sections have welcomed structural reforms like the Lokpal, the need for parallel reforms and feeder systems has been recommended time-and-again. Comprehensive systemic reforms are at the base of any anti-corruption paradigm. The establishment of an ombudsman or anti-corruption institution like the Lokpal is an effort in this direction, but one cannot deny the need for other parallel administrative, legal, political and judicial reforms to curb graft in the country.
Talking about parallel reforms, electoral and administrative reformshave topped the discussion list with almost everyone seeing merit in them. Especially in India, elections are the fountainheads of corruption as muscle, money powers dominate the scene. Introduction of state funding of elections and exercising strict supervision of election expenditure is the need of the hour. Unless corruption is controlled in the electoral front backed by adequate electoral reforms, one cannot expect good governance.
Factors responsible for deep-rooted corruption in the Indian political and bureaucratic system are ambiguous laws and policies, lack of transparency in decision making, over-complicated procedures, to name a few. Transactional or retail cases of corruption often stem from these grey areas. It is important to address these issues making it impossible for our babus to indulge in corrupt practices. The Right to Information Act is a great start towards narrowing the existing loopholes.
Rukshana Nanayakkara, acting director of Transparency International’s Asia Pacific divisionrecognises the Right to Information Act as a successful weapon to uncover instances of corruption and bribery in the public sector. But he also notes the lack of a law that guarantees safety and protection to citizens who use the Act to expose corrupt public servants and officials. No law or enforcement is meaningful if citizens hesitate to use it due to fear of harassment, exploitation and lack of protection. Similarly, investigating agencies are often required to compromise on various trials as they lack the power to initiate any action or prosecute any public official without the government’s go ahead. Prior government sanctions are a great deterrent in carrying forward these cases smoothly and quickly.
Having said that whether it is the Lokpal or any other agency, its institution should be supplemented with adequate autonomy, prosecution powers and other checks and balances so as to fasten the process of investigation and judgments. Laws and policies must not be anachronistic in nature. It is important to review them, deliberate on them and evolve policies in consensus with concerned stakeholders. Reforms in all parallel spheres should accordingly be advocated so as to minimise corruption and improve public delivery mechanisms. Multi-level and multi-institutional reforms are an important and necessary step toward regulating, monitoring and eliminating corruption in any society especially in a democracy.