Corruption and good governance

By SANJAY PRAKASH

Earlier, people earned to live; now they live to earn. Obviously, the transformed attitude has pushed the ethics of an individual out of its own reach. To achieve the sole objective of earning money, to satisfy their never-ending desires, people use short-cuts. Once the individual takes to the short-cuts, paved by fraudulent activities, he becomes deaf to the voice of his conscience. It is not that people are unaware of their acts but there is a basic difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. So ultimately one is trapped in the web of short-cuts or the all-powerful "money".

>From the development perspective, corruption can be considered a two-way street so far as the donor and recipient countries interface is concerned. Very often scandals of graft have been disclosed. Yet, graft is not possible without collusion among giant private corporations and public agencies, foreign contractors, or consultants. Sometimes, such activity is associated with foreign aid. Foreign companies practically argue that bribery is nothing but one of the costs of doing business in a country. What can be done about these circumstances poses a challenge not only to the aid recipient government but also to donors.

This connection the recommendations for both recipient as well as donors are: simplify the rules, reduce unnecessary regulations, rely more on market forces, insist upon meeting the procurement and contracting standards; ensure laws that make it mandatory to meet auditing requirements, study audit reports, and pay attention to the manner in which the disbursements are handled. The World Bank has become particular about these points. Despite the above safeguards, the problems are still daunting. Therefore, donors have a specific responsibility to ensure that commercial considerations do not undermine good economic management in developing countries. Encouraging governments to come up with sound public investment programmes and priority is important. The donor’s contributions can be meaningful if recipient countries are prepared to listen. In many cases, recipients blame donors when assistance programmes fail to achieve the intended results. This is not fair. It is the recipient country’s responsibility to make sound strategies for aid programmes based on a comprehensive study beforehand. This calls for thorough homework that analyses and anticipates detailed end results.

Eradicating corruption at all levels in the Nepalese bureaucracy should become a basic concern for political leaders as well as bureaucrats. Corruption can be reduced by practising greater transparency. For this, the role of the people is equally pivotal. More importantly, people’s support for eliminating corruption can be attained only when political leaders are deeply imbued with a sense of integrity, responsibility and sacrifice.

Recently, the donor community, on their part, raised concern over issues including crisis in governance, rampant corruption and poor implementation of development projects. They also urged the government to trim the size of the bureaucracy to reduce soaring government expenditure. The government’s reform agenda rests on the commitments made at the NDF in Paris in April 2000. The proposed priority actions involve initiatives in macro-economic stability, civil service reform, anti-corruption initiatives, decentralisation, financial sector reform, private sector development, aid effectiveness and the role of society in development.

Sometimes corruption is home-grown but all too often international business corporations are seen to have bribed political leaders and public officials in other countries or funded political parties in a way which threatens the proper working of the democratic process.

The prime concern is with ‘the misuse of public power for private benefit,’ often called grand corruption. Grand corruption usually involves the giving of a benefit to a political leader or senior public official by a businessman in return for a decision in his favour. It is usually something that the leader should not do and that is also likely to be illegal.

All acts of corruption exhibit the following characteristic: They involve more than one person, on the whole, they involve secrecy except in situations where they have become so rampant and deep rooted that some powerful individuals or those under their protection would not bother to hide their activities; they involve an element of mutual obligation and mutual benefit; those who engage in them usually attempt to camouflage their activities by resorting to some sort of lawful justification. They avoid open clash with the law; those involved in them want definite decisions from those who are able to influence those decisions; they involve betrayal of trust; they involve contradictory dual functions of those committing the act; and they violate the norm of duty and responsibility within the civic order. These acts can broadly be classified into three categories: extortion, nepotism and bribery.

There are those who believe that corruption has positive consequences for society. In many developing and least developed countries, for example, corrupt practices serve as a means by which
the western inspired bureaucracy and administrative systems are reconnected to indigenous realities and adopted to the every day lives of the people. For one acts of corruption sometimes function as redistribute mechanisms which allow the disadvantaged groups in a society to gain access to and avail of the required goods and services from the government. They serve as means to assimilate into the political system those who would otherwise be excluded by the legal system.

For the most part, however, corruption is simply a means to cope with and survive the complex requirements and stringent impositions of an alien bureaucracy. On the part of the corrupt party, for example, bribery is simply a more efficient and probably much safer means of gaining access to productive and subsistence resources they need than committing acts of violent resistance. On the part of the corrupt civil servants, on the other hand, soliciting money or gifts from those seeking favours is far easier than applying for loans from their respective agencies.

The revenue service is more lucrative among the government services. As it has been said Kar ma basyo ghar baninchha. Bhansar ma basiyo bhane sansar baninchha (If you work in the Tax Office, you will build a house, while in the customs you can make your own world).

The negative effects of corruption on society as a whole far outweigh the short-term benefits it allows to some sectors of society, however. The undermining effects it has on the allocative and distributive functions of the state translate to undelivered goods and services to the sectors that need them the most.

Corrupt practices distort the distribution of opportunities in favour of the more powerful and more influential members of society.

If bureaucratic corruption is a coping mechanism that evolve out of the need to reconnect the bureaucracy to the realities of the day-to-day existence of people in society, how did it evolve over time? How can the social problem of corruption be resolved? First, we have to recognise that social norms and value systems are accumulated experiences of successful collective coping mechanisms over time. As such, they are more difficult to change just to suit an alien notion of what an ideal public administrative system should be.

This being the case, efforts should be undertaken towards reorienting government administrative practices to make them suitable to the prevailing norms and values rather than the other way round. It is only when the government bureaucracy could prove and assert its role as the protector of the collective sentiment of the members of society that efforts to address corruption could actually be more successful. As such the following strategy for controlling corruption can be recommended: honesty should flow from top down, and create an atmosphere under which the chances for indulging in corrupt practices are kept down to the minimum. While doing so, if there is corruption, the corrupt should be taken to the courts for punishment. Both curative and preventive measures should be adopted and implemented accordingly.

Invaluable property

Every month when we turn the new pages of the calendar, the new pages have something in store for us. Some pages have the stock of festivals and social whirl, some have the perfect kind of days to carry out an auspicious occasion while some have tiresome days without any fiesta and holidays. In no time the "Almighty Time" ticks away and we need to hang a new calendar on the wall or erect a new mini-one on the desk. Talking about this month (Falgun), its leaflet has granted auspicious days for those who are tying their nuptial-knots. Marriages (not the card game) are really in. To attend a wedding reception or to witness a marriage procession by the roadside is a common feature of this month.

Needless to chant marriage is a serious affair and if one undertakes it in haste, then sorry to say he/she has to repent at leisure. Since, I am talking about marriage, I can’t help sharing an incident which a colleague of mine had shared with me. A girl reached nubility. As a result, her family was in quest of a suitable groom for her. Her parents found a guy having following qualities-graduate of a reputed university, nice-looking and a rich fellow helping his father to run a business. So far, so good, but then not a single soul was interested to know about his nature, attitude and whether his and her chemistry will work out on not? For the girl’s parents the guy sounded ‘Mr Perfect’ from every angle (0 degree-360 degree). The girl who has every right to know about her would-be hubby selected by her parents, asked for permission to meet him before giving the final decision, albeit in vain... She was informed that she could have a rendezvous with him only when their marriage (date, time, venue almost everything) and necessary rites performed to symbolize the marriage-fixation! Smart girl, desperate to know about the guy’s mental outlook arranged a date with him, not giving the slightest hint about it to her elders. Surprisingly, on the first date itself the guy dropped boulders from his mouth. He demanded that he needs a personal TV set for his (their) room and a new refrigerator as a gift to his mother, from the girl’s side! Well no prize for guessing on what the girl did next? She bade him adieu and took to her heels. Though her parents were in sound position to present her more than what he had demanded, she was not interested in a guy interested in property rather than a person.

Well, this may be just a minute fraction in front of the mammoth dowry problem where even the lives of the married girls are taken away. The immoral ones do not hesitate to place their demand and even go to extremes of taking away innocent lives. There are no parents who don’t shower their daughter with gifts and presents as per their capacity and budget. This has been practiced since time immemorial (for reference one can read the stories from Swasthani Brata Katha). Above all, the girl’s parents are giving away their daughter-the apple of their eyes. The child, whose finger they caught and taught her how to walk, instilled all the good values and culture in her and loved her more than anything else, once married is no longer in front of their eyes. They hand their angel to a stranger with so much trust and belief in him. As a matter of fact, shouldn’t he be more than happy and grateful for the trust and respects showered on him and feel honoured to take away with him their invaluable property?

Owl for breakfast Juggling Act

By JUG suraiya

Breakfast is not my favourite time of night. I know because I tried it once, 19 years ago. You crawl out of bed, tongue coated with designer fur a la Jackie Shroff’s whiskers, grope your way zombie -- like to the sink in the loo, wonder what that funny pain in the side of your head is till you discover you’ve shoved the toothbrush in your ear instead of into the more conventional aperture, stagger to the kitchen where awaits nemesis in the shape of a plate from which stare at you two slithery, runny, bilious yellow orbs which you realise with rising gorge aren’t an order of farm fresh sunnyside-ups at all but the reflection of your own gummy eyes peering blearily at you, and you make it back to the loo in the nick of time. No thanks, no breakfast for me. If humankind is divided between larks and owls, I’m a confirmed, born-again owl.

So it was with considerable qualms that I listened to the cheery voice over the phone inviting me to be a guest on Doordarshan’s Breakfast Show. Breakfast Show? I knew they’d had a Dinner Show on DD, where the host would invite people to dinner and it would turn out that they were the dinner. But electronic cannibalism at breakfast time? Sounded pretty despo to me.

But the voice on the phone assured me that it was all perfectly pucca and above board, just some light badinage with the host of the show, no fear of putting my foot in someone else’s mouth, or vice-versa. The car would take me to the studio at 7.30; we went on live at 8.

Well, you can’t say no, can you? Not after the poor things have got all channelled up and with no one to go to them. So I agreed, though I had grave misgivings about that ‘live’ bit. Could anyone be live at breakfast time?

These and other preoccupations kept me up most of Sunday night, tossing and turning, checking every hour on the hour on the alarm which I’d set to go off at 6. I fell into a fitful doze at 5.55, to be jangled awake two minutes later by the infernal machine which having run behind for years had decided to catch up on lost time today and overtaken it. Having shaved my teeth, combed my clothes, put on my hair, or whatever, I ventured out into the eerie, probably lethal, radiation of the early morning sunlight, which I hadn’t seen for 19 years.

The car was waiting, as promised, and we shot off at a breakneck lick, me clutching onto the armrest and wondering if they’d really been serious about that ‘live’ business or were prepared to settle for a little bit dead. We reached the studio with ten minutes to go.

I hopped out and went up to a gate guarded by a uniform enclosing one of those large, economy-size Jats that you get by so much the hundredweight. "Pass", scowled the uniform, which I took to be an invitation to enter and proceed on my way. But a brawny limb blocked my path. "Oy!" said the uniform. "Where’s your pass?" Watching visions of my prospective Emmy fade, I tried to explain that I was the guest for whom the Breakfast Show even now awaiteth, but somehow Chhota-Hazri ka Tamasha didn’t sound quite right even to me, particularly when translated into Jatese.

Fortunately help was at hand, and I was whisked through, first to a make-up room where some green guck and then some white guck was squished onto my face, and then onto the recording set, cluttered with cables and lights and cameras, where the host of the show, cool, urbane and immaculate in jacket and tie, turned to me with a beaming smile and asked me the first question live. And I froze. The sleepless night, the pellmell rush, the bright lights had zonked me into a catatonic trance. I was out for the count.

Later people who’d seen the show told me how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I’d been on it. "But I was in a coma throughout," I protested. "Nonsense," they said. "You came through loud and clear, you were even quite witty once or twice, by mistake."

And then the penny dropped. The Breakfast Show host is not just an accomplished compere; he’s also a virtuoso ventriloquist. And I of course make the perfect dummy — especially at breakfast time.