CORRUPTION INEFFICIENCY IN INDIA

Get the job done Jug Suraiya , --- Times of India issue dated 08 01 14 More than corruption, it’s gross inefficiency that’s India’s biggest problem Driving back to Delhi on NH 24, we came to a fork in the road. There was no signboard to indicate which was the route to Delhi, or where the other road went. Eventually we got directions from a passing bullock cart (yes, a bullock cart on a so-called National Highway). The highway cost thousands of crores to build. Much of that money must have gone by way of graft to a hierarchy of netas, babus, contractors and middlemen. Having denuded the public coffers of all that money, no one involved in the project thought of spending a few hundred rupees in putting up a signboard which would help travellers get to their destinations without help from passing bullock carts. We all decry corruption as being the biggest obstacle to national progress. Certainly corruption, at all levels of our polity, is a heavy burden on the country. But the final straw that breaks the Indian elephant’s back is not graft but sheer inefficiency – a seemingly innate inability to get the job done and get it done right. We’ll build a multi-crore highway, and then fail to put adequate signage on it so that travellers can find their way. We can spend thousands of crores – many of which were siphoned away – on an extravaganza like the Commonwealth Games, and then become the jeering stock of the world because of filthy toilets. For almost 70 years we’ve spent many fortunes on supposed subsidies for the poor which have enriched rent-seekers while entrenching poverty rather than eradicating it. Corruption is only part of the cause of our failures on all these and other fronts. The other, if not major, reason for our being unable to get things done is our genius for bungling, for getting things wrong instead of getting them right. Other societies are as corrupt as ours. Thailand and China being just two examples. Currently, the Thai government is facing massive unrest because of its alleged chronic corruption. But the average Thai citizen is better off than the average Indian. In the early 1970s, the Thai baht was worth about 50 paise Indian; today the baht is worth about two rupees. Corrupt Thailand has gone forward, corrupt India has gone backward. There is large-scale corruption in China. Recently, one of the highest political luminaries, Bo Xilai, was tried and sentenced to life for corrupt practices (will India ever witness a neta, or any other so-called ‘high-up’, being executed for a similar offence?). Despite all its graft and corruption, which is equal to if not greater than India’s, China has far outstripped us in material progress. India has a lesson to learn from China and Thailand: be corrupt if you must, but with it be efficient; take the money, but deliver the goods. India’s biggest bane is not corruption, it is not that people in power steal money; it is that those who steal our money seem incapable of accomplishing anything – from building a user-friendly highway to eliminating poverty through subsidies and other schemes. Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP has risen like a desi avatar of St George to battle the dragon of corruption. But it might have an even bigger ogre to combat in the form of systemic ineptitude which just can’t make things work. That’s the real job cut out for AAP. Will it be able to get the job done? __._,_._____,_._,___--