The following essay received third place in TRACE International’s 2008 essay contest and was selected for publishing in ethisphere Magazine.
Writers were asked to write their thoughts on “what personal behaviors, what laws or policies, what deterrents or incentives, what reporting devices or transparency mechanisms, what educational campaigns, what measures of any kind have been or could be effective in resisting or curtailing bribery?”
Bribery is an important part of life in India. With an elaborate and almost Byzantine bureaucratic system and a long legacy of a corrupt civil service, it’s hard to escape the clutches of corruption. From handing over a hundred rupee note when you get pulled over for speeding to escape a ticket, to assuming that getting a file from the government offices will require “grease money,” to scams worth thousands of billions of rupees involving the top politicians in the country: we have come to accept corruption, while at th e same time berating it at every juncture. Innovative means are sometimes used to fight it: there were reports recently of people in Orissa, a state in India, who printed a note with a denomination of zero rupees to give to officials demanding bribes in order to register their protest at this practice. However, more serious efforts have been initiated and have been successful as well. This essay won’t deal with a description of corruption as such, and will focus on various innovative means to fighting bribery that have been employed in India. In the course of the essay, the term corruption will be used to encompass not just bribery but other similar social phenomena as well, in order to give a more holistic description of the problem.
01 // MKSS and the Right to Information Movement
The right to information has been a real boon in the fight against governmental bribery in India.1 In the early nineties, a mass-based organization calling itself the Mazdoor (Labour) Kisan (Farmer) Shakti (Strength) Sangathan (Organization) (MKSS) started working in one of the most neglected areas of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Meeting their basic needs with modest public contributions from the community, the core group started out life in a small mud hut in the village of Devdungari.2 The MKSS prepared no project proposals, received no foreign funds, recruited no administrative staff and attracted no visitors, thus making it difficult to classify and slot them. All they did was walk from village to village asking simple questions: “Did the people know how much money was coming to their village for development and where it was being spent?” The problem lay in the fact that next to no information was available to the villagers, and the officials denied them the same. At the national and state levels, planners, politicians and administrators, all out of touch with reality, were claiming there was total transparency. At the village level, however, vouchers, bills and muster rolls that showed who was receiving payments or wages were kept secret.
The MKSS launched a people’s campaign the like of which had never been seen or experienced in Rajasthan since the Freedom Movement in the 1940s. The campaign included several public hearings where cases of misappropriation and corruption of public funds were shared with several thousand people.4 Very slowly, and with much battling with the government, the Right to Information Act was finally put into effect.
For the first time since the Panchayat movement was founded in the 1950s under Nehru, village representatives began to return the money they had embezzled from their constituencies. It was not fear of the law or arrest or departmental inquiry or suspension that made them act this way. It was fear of the people through the public hearings that finally humbled them.5 This case highlights an innovative solution to the problem of corruption: the solution was found not in the acts or publications of the government but by realizing the immense power of the right to information. Public access to information is important in a number of ways. Firstly, it exposes existing corruption. While many members of the public may correctly believe that corruption exists in the administration, few if any would know the specifics involved. Yet it is these specifics that matter most in bringing corruption to light. Also, since corruption deprives members of the public of their basic entitlements, information is necessary for them to secure what is rightfully theirs.
In the gathering of information relating to development projects and detection of corruption therein, a powerful weapon is the social audit. A social audit collects official data and compares it with the actual progress of a project. For instance, a social auditor may take the progress report or measurement book for a development work and compare it with the on ground construction thus highlighting discrepancies between the official version and actual fact. A social audit can be carried out by any interested members of the public. Often social audits turn up interesting results.
The right to information is a very important tool, and, as this case study shows, has been effective in weeding out corruption at the grass roots level. This example is being emulated in various parts of the country, which is a very positive development.
02 // Corruption in the NREGA
The NREGA—the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act—is a social legislation enacted by the government in recent years which aims to provide employment to millions of India’s population settled in the villages. With such a wide scope, safeguards are necessary. The example of MKSS highlighted above was used in this regard. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India recently released a report regarding the working of the NREGA, focusing mainly on procedural lapses and questioning whether NREGA funds actually reach the poor. The methodology used was that of muster roll verification which was developed in Rajasthan in the context of the right to information movement. This learning process offered an opportunity to develop a range of transparency safeguards for public works schemes (such as the pro-active disclosure of muster rolls, regular maintenance of “job cards,” and social audits). Many of them have been incorporated in the Operational Guidelines of NREGA, and even in the Act itself. There is a good deal of informal evidence from Rajasthan that these safeguards can go a long way in preventing corruption.6
Innovative and serious efforts have been taken to prevent the spread of corruption in NREGA. For instance, the govern-ment of Tamil Nadu has initiated an imaginative system of muster roll maintenance whereby each labourer has to enter her signature or thumbprint in the muster roll every day to mark attendance. This ensures not only that the muster roll is available for public scrutiny at the worksite, as required by the NREGA guidelines, but also that large numbers of people actually see it every day. In this and other ways, much progress has been made towards a “leak-proof” system. The government of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has taken the bold step of paying all NREGA wages through post offices. This is an example of the “separation of payment agencies from implementing agencies,” recommended in the NREGA guidelines. This sys- tem helps to remove the incentive the implementing agencies have to fudge muster rolls, because the payments are beyond their reach. In addition, Andhra Pradesh has put in place a system of institutionalized social audits, involving routine verification of NREGA records through participatory processes. Social audit reports cite these safeguards as quite effective. While various forms of petty corruption, such as bribes being taken by postmasters, have emerged from the social audits, there is no evidence of the sort of large-scale fraud that plagued public works schemes in Andhra Pradesh just a few years ago.7 If bribery and corruption can be reduced by incorporating simple structural changes like these, perhaps these changes can be incorporated into national legislation and reach and improve the lives of millions who suffer.
03 // Using the Internet as a means of spreading information
The information superhighway is advancing and entering the lives of millions of Indians, and the Internet is proving to be one of the most effective means of countering corruption. By ending the information asymmetry and placing it directly in the hands of the people, a large change is being wrought. Earlier, vital information, including budget allocations, status of application etc., was the stronghold of the bureaucrats and the middlemen, which was a festeriflashpoint for rampant brib- ery and corruption. With e-governance removing the need for middlemen and placing information directly at the doorsteps of the people, such practices have automatically seen a decline. For example, the Gyandoot programme in the Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh is networked to 31 village centres. The service covers wide ranging information needs of the villagers like agri- cultural produce, auction centre rates, copies of land records, on-line registration of applications, village auction sites and more. In Rajasthan, Nyala became the first village of the state to have the Raj Nidhi Information Kiosk, through which citizens are able to access information related to health, family planning, employment, taxes and water and electricity. The Andhra Pradesh Twin Cities Network Services [TWINS] launched in December 1999 provides an initial set of 18 services to the citizens of Ward 8 of Hyderabad.8 Bringing the government one step closer to the people removes the middlemen and the consequent need to give them bribes in order to get work done.
The Internet can be used in other ways in the fight against bribery and corruption. Consider the example of Sunanda Devi, a woman whose husband is a whistleblower in the civil services in India. When he began to be threatened by the people whose corruption he was helping bring to light, she started her own website9 to help raise awareness about her husband’s plight. With more people finding out about his work, the threats to his life ceased as well.10 Her example shows that if you bring the act of bribery and corruption out in the open and publicly name and shame the officials, one can do more than quietly accept the treatment meted out to you.
WHILE VIGILANTE JUSTICE AND PRACTICES OUTSIDE THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK ARE EXTREME, THE DESPERATE POVERTY IN MOST PARTS OF RURAL INDIA NO DOUBT CONVINCES THE GULABI GANG AND THEIR ADMIRERS THAT THEIR ACTIONS ARE THE ONLY EFFECTIVE OPTIONS.
These examples indicate that when information spreads, it is harder for officials to continue with their corrupt practices. By making sure that official, procedural and other kinds of information reach down to the lowest grassroots level to all sections of the society—even the most marginalized ones—these people are being empowered and the stronghold of corruption is being weakened.
04 // The Gulabi Gang
The term “gulabi gang,” which roughly translates into “Pink Brigade,” refers to a group of women who have come together to fight a number of difficulties that they face, supreme amongst them being corruption. They wear pink saris and go after corrupt officials and boorish men with sticks and axes.12 The several hundred vigilante women of India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state’s Banda area who proudly call themselves the “gulabi gang” have struck fear in the hearts of wrongdoers and earned the grudging respect of officials.13 Although it is difficult to accept or endorse such violent vigilantism, one can perhaps understand its origins.
A look at their background reflects, perhaps, the need for a group of such commitment, if not such tactics. Banda is at the heart of the blighted region that is Bundelkhand, one of the poorest parts of one of India’s most populous states. It is among the poorest 200 districts in India which were first targeted for the federal government’s massive jobs-for- work programme. Over 20% of its 1.6 million people living in 600 villages are lower castes or untouchables. Drought has parched its already arid, single-crop lands. To make matters worse, women bear the brunt of poverty and discrimination in Banda’s highly caste-ridden, feudalistic and male dominated society. Dowry demands and domestic and sexual violence are common. It is disturbing, but not surprising, that a women’s vigilante group has sprung up in retaliation to this landscape of poverty, discrimination and chauvinism.
While vigilante justice and practices outside the legal framework are extreme, the desperate poverty in most parts of rural India no doubt convinces the gulabi gang and their admirers that their actions are the only effective options.
One other common form of corruption should be explored. Any bureaucrat who spends the money budgeted and allocated is considered efficient, so the mad rush to show that the annual budget has actually been spent at year-end is simply solved by falsifying receipt vouchers and muster rolls on a colossal scale. Thousands of schools, dispensaries, roads, small dams, community centres and residential quarters have been shown to be complete on paper, but in reality are incomplete and abandoned. The defenseless poor therefore turn to groups like the gulabi gang: people taking up arms against an obviously corrupt and unjust system. It can be tempting to conclude that in places where the government has left such an evident void, it is perhaps better that justice is served through unconven- tional means than not at all.
These examples have illustrated a number of radically different approaches to the problem of corruption. As corruption has become institutionalized and is very much a part of the system, it may be too optimistic to think of a complete removal of this evil. It is often even said to be economically beneficial, since it is increasing efficiency at a small cost. However, when it gets out of hand, the means and methods that do seem to be helping are the unorthodox and creative means being devised by people who bear the brunt of the problem and come up with innovative solutions to help themselves. These range from the slightly ludicrous—there were reports of people printing zero Rupee notes to give as mock bribes to corrupt officials—to much more effective ones, as highlighted above. These efforts provide clues on how to implement these measures on a more formal and long term basis as well.
Ms. Vrinda Maheshwari is from New Delhi, where she is a student at the National Law School of India University. She was the third place winner in TRACE International’s recent essay contest on bribery.
1 Abhijeet Singh, “Corruption and Economic Development: Right to Information as a Remedy”
2 See generally: www.mkssindia.org/.
3 “RTI Campaign: MKSS gift to India,” at rti.aidindia.org/content/view/12/54/.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 “Rajasthan Role Model for Muster Roll Verification,” The Hindu, July 13, 2007.
7 Not all experiences have been as good. Orissa, as has been widely reported, has been a rude shock. There muster roll verification exercises were conducted in October 2007 for 30 randomly selected worksites spread over three districts (Bolangir, Boudh and Kalahandi). The findings of this investigation have been reported elsewhere (The Hindu, November 20, 2007). Orissa had barely begun the transition from the “traditional system” of corruption in public works schemes (involving private contractors, mass fudging of muster rolls, and institutionalized kickbacks) towards a transparent and accountable system. The transparency safeguards had been sabotaged by vested interests and the system was virtually unverifiable. In Bolangir and Kalahandi, the infamous “PC system” (whereby various functionaries demand fixed percentages of scheme funds) continued and seemed to absorb around 22 percent of NREGA funds. The silver lining is that even in this corruption-ridden region, there were many indications of positive change. As checks and balances are put in place, the system is becoming harder for vested interests to manipulate, and corruption is coming down. The clampdown on corruption has recently intensified, after Orissa earned a bad name for mass corruption in NREGA.
8 Dominic Mendis, “E-governance in India,” at http://www.the-south-asian.com/Oct2001/E-Governance.htm.
9 www.letsfightcorruptionnow.wikidot.com.
10 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/02/news/india.php?page=1.
11 CMS Study on Corruption In India: An Overview of Corruption in Urban Services, 2000.
