personally, i think corruption started on aug 15, 1947. the scale of corruption may have increased, but that is only in proportion, i think, to what the 'market could bear'. ie if one does not have the money to pay a bribe, there is no deal.
so, it is in the interest of the corruptor to demand payment in proportion to what the corruptee can afford. for example, in order to get police clearance for passport, it is possible, that for the very same service rendered, a clerk could be paying a fraction of what an executive might shell out.
so, instead of having multiple layers of vigilance officers, each layer of which have to be bribed, the solution may be to do away with the process of police certificate for passport. knowing well now, that many indian passports may be in the name of spurious identities, doing away with the verification process, in the ultimate, may not be such a bad thing after all.
as anyone travelling on an indian passport knows, he has double the trouble to get a visa to many countries, and hefty interrogations at the visa office and on landing. this is not going to change whether we continue with police verification or do away with it completely. outside of india, each of us have to prove our bonafide before we are allowed to enter a foreign country. our indian passport has already been corrupted beyond any redeemable respect.
i am quite sure, we can take any activity in our daily life and come up with sensible, workable and achievable solutions. i was in chennai recently, and here the concept of metered payment is a joke. sure enough, every auto has shiny working meters, regualry attested to their 'honesty' by some seal from the commissioner of police or such.
no auto driver, would however put on the meter for any சவாரி. you tell him the destination, and if you are lucky enough to engage a driver who knows the city, the guy will evaluate you and name a price - say from mylapore kapali temple to loyola college: 50 rupees for a local, and 150 rupees for an idiot NRI like me. i will bargain him to 120 rupees, feel happy that i got a 25% discount, and the driver is happy that he more than 100% premium on the சவாரி.
as a reward, he will open up eloquently to the ills of the city, state and country. to start off, he will ridicule the imposed fare structure for the auto. it was set up with everyone's agreement when petrol was around 32 rupees a litre. today it is double that. the price of petrol today, in india, as i understand it, reflect international spot prices. so it is constantly fluctuating and always appear to go only 'up'.
i have no answer for the chennai auto driver. i have, similarly no answer for my toronto cab driver, who charges me $60 (+ expected tip) from the airport to my home, who too lives in a world of daily changing petrol prices. his only response is to grumble, when i tender him the credit card - he wants cash as otherwise he has to pay $5 to the card company for each transaction.
if the law is an ass, then humans work around it to achieve their goals.
corruption, if i remember existed a lot too, in nehru's time. his favourite defence minister krishna menon was accused of skimming contract money set aside to purchase warm clothing, trucks and guns for our troops fighting the chinese. morarji desai resigned from the cabinet over corruption rumours. so too did t.t.krishnamachari, who used his influence to set up, T.T. Ltd for his son Vasu.
when i was growing up, my dad's congress friends, overnight had access to the new 'permits' imposed by the government and started inefficient and monopoly factories - several of them around madras. this during kamaraj and venkataraman time. most of them are rusted junkyards today, and the land on which they lie more valuable than the machinery inside or the products that comes out of them.
back to stashed money in foreign banks.
so, it is coming to light now about the huge amounts in foreign banks. it may do us good to step through what could happen if this money is brought back. on the face of it, india does not have, i think, any problem in raising money to build a china-type infrastructure. what is stopping us is not the money, but the will. we appear unable to channelise our resources into a mass nation building process which the chinese have done.
so, if all these money is brought back, it will chase the existing goods and services - primarily land, because that is one commodity which does not increase. so we might see land prices spiralling even faster. along with it, with more cash, more folks will be behaving like idiot NRIs like me, fuelling the expectations of normal service providers like the auto driver or the vegetable vendor.
so, the average citizen might be forced to do without daily 'musts' because he does not have the money to pay for the greed fuelled by the 'returned' balck money. so he will demand more pay, strike and civil unrest will ensure.
so, in the interest of the peace of the country and in the interest of the liveability of the common man, i think, it is best, that all these foreign money remain foreign and never see the shores of india. i agree that mineis too glib an arguement for probably a shameful and treacherous act against the motherland. but i see the permanent exile of black money lesser of all the evils that is besetting our country.
