Root cause of corruption in India

Corruption is part and parcel of our life. A common person is faced with this problem, almost every time he approaches Public authorities for any permission, exemption or for any other public benefit. There are numerous allegations against public authorities for corruption with respect to functions like permission for building a residential accommodation, opening up a restaurant or any other commercial activity, tax assessment, law enforcement, issuance of a ration card, passport or driving license, and even for providing public utilities like water, electricity or even a hospital bed. To eradicate this social evil of corruption, it is necessary to look into the root cause of this corruption and also into primary remedy available to the common citizens.

It is ordinary people who run the public institutions, or at least they are ordinary before being appointed as public servants. The issue is why is an ordinary person, after being appointed to public office becomes corrupt.

The fundamental question is “why do people pay bribe.” And the answer is obvious. People pay bribe to the public authorities because they can accept or reject the request of a person or sometime they can delay it.

Let us take an example; say a person is requesting some public authority for a license. The authority may grant the license or may reject the application. The authority may delay the processing of the request for long amount of time. They may decide to “fully scrutinize the request” which may take years. They may make the person visit the office of the authority quite a number of times. Sometime the request may get misplaced and many a times the authority may be waiting for some report to come from some other authority which may take quite a long amount of time. The person is bewildered as what to do. Every visit to an office has some cost in terms of time, money and inconvenience. And then he founds a tout roaming around who advises him just to pay some amount, euphemistically called “Suvidha shulka” or convenience fee.

The point which needs to be appreciated that in this whole exercise, if no illegal favour has been given to the applicant then why he is ready to pay bribe or if illegal favour has been given to the applicant then who is the main culprit of corruption.

For example, there are stringent building laws and its violations are evident whenever one passes through any street of any city of this country. Now decide who is responsible, either Municipal authorities or who violates the building rules.

In our daily life, most of us must have been a witness to or a victim of the corruption thriving in some or the other part of the country. It could be in the form of a government officer taking bribery to promptly transfer your file to the next department or even yourself offering bribe to a traffic police on breaking a signal. Again we have to decide that who is giving or offering the bribe and why.

So please stop giving or taking of bribe.........

Gather to start this movement..................