Poll Analysis | Corruption on wheels
Over the last one decade, corruption has received remarkable media attention in India, thanks to its recurrent out-breaks — Adarsh Housing society, 2G Spectrum scam and Coalgate scam.
Yet the attention to high-level scandals gets obfuscated by the corruption present in the grassroots. It could be for any kind of service - getting driving licenses, birth or death certificates, Khata registration, gas connections or pensions. You name it and you need to pay a bribe for the service.
Retail corruption has infiltrated every section of our society. Can you imagine that you have to pay a bribe to get a bus ticket? Many a time, we get reports where people recount the humiliation they experience when forced to pay a bribe for a bus ticket.
A citizen of Namakkal (Tamil Nadu) writes to us on how bus conductors don’t return change after issuing tickets to commuters, even when they have coins to return.
In another incident, a respondent from Pune shares his experience on how he had to pay an extra amount of Rs.50 to a bus conductor to get a seat in a AIRVAT Volvo bus.
This is a common practice in India where bus conductors take extra money for tickets or seats. But hardly anyone identifies this as a form of corruption. To know our readers’ opinion on this, we asked a question, “You paid Rs.10 for a bus ticket of Rs.9. If the bus conductor doesn’t return the change, would you consider this as corruption?” The results of the poll show that 74 per cent of voters have agreed that this is a form of retail corruption while 26 per cent of voters refuse to identify this as corruption.
A respondent sharing her/his disheartening experience said that once a bus conductor from BMTC tried to throw the person out of the running bus for protesting against bribery. The person gave Rs.10 for a ticket of Rs.9 but the bus conductor did not return the remaining one rupee. When the person asked for the remaining one rupee, she/he was verbally abused and humiliated. The person asked a question, “This is not about one rupee, this is about corruption. Why should I give my money to anyone?”