Fw: article on corruption in India

["Ram Narayanan" <ramn@adelphia.net>]

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate it!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a very interesting article that appeared in the Industry
Standard...[6.19.2000]

Ungreasing Palms In India
An anticorruption crusader discovers the Internet cuts bureaucracy and
bribes.
By Monika Halan

To be a common man in India is expensive. Need a phone, or gas for your home
or electricity for your factory? Pay up. The palms of corrupt government
officials are outstretched.

An estimated 10 percent to 25 percent of India's $260 billion economy flows
through underground channels, according to the Central Vigilance Commission,
a government agency charged with rooting out corrupt officials from among
the 12.5 million government employees. Corruption is a public secret:
Everyone knows, but no one has wanted to say anything about it. Until now.

Nagraj Vittal took over the CVC in September 1998. The commission had been
sending annual reports to Parliament for 35 years, but they languished there
unread. Various officials made noise about cleaning up the government, but
nothing ever seemed to happen. Among Vittal's first moves was to require
each government department to hang in its office a notice that encouraged
citizens and officials to notify the CVC if someone asks for a bribe.

But though the offices posted the notices, life went on as before.

Then, in January 1999, Vittal did the unthinkable. He put up two Web pages
listing allegedly corrupt members of the Indian Administrative Service and
the Indian Police Service, the country's premier government agencies. The 86
civil servants and 22 police officers had been the subject of criminal
investigations since 1990.

The list made national news. And while the public face of the bureaucracy
remained serene, the uproar in the clubhouses, luxury hotels and
air-conditioned offices of the top bureaucrats was deafening. A senior
retired IAS officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, says of Vittal: "He's
gone mad. He just wants publicity."

Only the Punjab State Police Officers' Association openly objected to
posting the list, saying it was defamatory because it contained names of
persons whose guilt was yet to be proven. Vittal then made a strategic
retreat: He modified the list to include only those who had been found
guilty of misconduct, and he removed those that are still under
investigation.

But Vittal soon expanded the list of what is popularly called the Rogues
Gallery to include 244 names in 23 departments, such as the Indian Forest
Service and public-sector banks. "This technology is the best tool to
provide transparency," says Vittal. "It is cost-effective, the message lasts
longer and reaches out to a larger number of people."

Indian courts are trying to tackle the problem. More than 3,000
anticorruption cases initiated by the Central Bureau of Investigation are
pending in courts. But corruption is still a low-risk, high-profit endeavor,
as the average case takes 10 to 20 years to decide, and the conviction rate
in the Indian courts is only 6 percent.

Vittal believes the Internet offers two important tools in the fight against
corruption: access to information and efficiency in the bureaucratic
process. Automating certain bureaucratic functions removes from the system
much of the delay, which causes corruption.

Vittal's detractors downplay the impact of his list. Only about 5 million of
India's 1 billion people have access to the Internet, they say. Furthermore,
only the middle class uses the Internet, and the middle class is corrupt.
What difference does it make if a corrupt man looks at another corrupt man's
name on a Web site?

Small signs indicate that citizens want to shrug off five decades of decay.
Every day, about 200 people complain to the CVC via the Net and by mail.
Perhaps more significant, Defense Minister George Fernandes in February told
Vittal to probe all defense deals - the breeding ground of the richest
kickbacks - since 1985.

A significant part of the shift comes from a new understanding that
corruption is expensive. Vittal writes on his Web site: "The World Bank is
also realizing that a country which is perceived to be corrupt gets at least
20 percent less foreign direct investment. If a country is perceived to be
more corrupt, it gets 35 percent less FDI." Vittal says he got these figures
from the United Nations Development Programme.

Supporters agree with Vittal's claim that technology battles corruption by
making public the names of offenders, and by streamlining bureaucracy and
thereby reducing opportunities for bribes.

Title transfer, for example, is "usually a cesspool of corruption
everywhere," says Srivatsa Krishna, the executive director of technology
services in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Automation reduces a several-month
process to "an hour or so, at best," he says - and the opportunity for
bribes is all but eliminated. "We aspire to use technology to make every
single interface of g2c and g2b a convenient, transparent, affordable
exercise, as seen from a citizen's perspective."

In Delhi, forms that previously required multiple visits to the local office
are now available on the Web, as well as names, addresses and phone numbers
of the relevant officers. Getting such information for free is a freeing
experience for citizens used to cringing before a clerk.

Bureaucrats as well as politicians are jumping on the anticorruption
bandwagon. Bimal Jalan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, says the
Banking Secrecy Act - which for years protected the identities of companies
- must be changed and the names made public of those companies that
consistently default on loans.

Vittal, a short, wiry 62-year-old, is a lifelong member of the class that he
polices. Formerly at the Ministry of Telecommunications, he had a reputation
for anticorruption vigilance before his appointment to the CVC. While many
government officials surround themselves with hangers-on and favor-seekers,
he is surprisingly entourage-free. He even picks up his own phone at home -
unthinkable for a high-ranking government official.

Ironically, while Vittal is a firm believer in the power of the Internet, he
is computer illiterate; a staff member checks his e-mail for him.

"The ideal government should be small, moral, accountable, responsible,
transparent," says Vittal. He wants to apply information technology in every
public office interface so the common citizen can have access to
information. His goal is to improve India's rank on the Transparency
International corruption index from 66 to "at least 40, if not 30" before
Sept. 2, 2002, when he completes his term at CVC.

"I'm just doing my duty," adds Vittal. "I have no other agenda. I have had a
full life and this post was unexpected. Now, I'm just doing my job. I'm
focusing on that."

Monika Halan is a writer in New Delhi.

________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the National Debate on System Reform.       debate@indiapolicy.org
Rules, Procedures, Archives:            ../debate/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------