Our corrupt babus

June 8th, 2009
A Hong Kong-based political and economic risk consultancy, which conducted a survey of 12 Asian economies recently, says that Singapore’s civil servants are the most efficient among their Asian peer, though they tend to clam up unhelpfully when things go wrong.

The survey ranked India’s “suffocating bureaucracy” as the least-efficient. The appraisal said that working with Indian civil servants was a “slow and painful” process. That the bureaucrats are a power-centre in their own right, at both the national and state levels, and are extremely resistant to reforms that affect them or the way they go about their duties. The survey’s ranking in descending order of efficiency was: Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Philippines, Indonesia and India.

This is in conformity with the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2008, prepared by Transparency International, which ranked India as the 74th most corrupt country among the 180 countries of the world.

The government is by far the biggest culprit and contributes a large part to the staggering backlog of civil suits, over 10 million at last count, clogging the courts. The Centre, states and public sector companies determinedly appeal every adverse verdict despite winning only a small minority.

The extent of government involvement in litigation was acknowledged by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a conference of chief ministers and Chief Justices in 2004. He revealed that a sample survey conducted in Karnataka found that in 65 per cent of civil cases, the government was a litigant, sometimes on both sides, and that “government litigation crowds out the private citizen from the court system”.

The Prime Minister, in the same speech, also confirmed that the Karnataka survey found that most of the government’s litigation was in the form of appeals and that 95 per cent of government appeals fail. He observed: “In a way, they are appeals that shouldn’t have been made in the first place”.

There is little reason to assume that things have changed since then. In fact, the Chief Justices of India themselves have drawn attention to government litigiousness on numerous occasions.

Incidentally, the Law Commission also observed nearly three decades ago that there was much avoidable litigation by the state. It exposed many instances where the judges found that citizens were compelled to litigate because of the “utter indifference” of the government, where government pursued litigation on “frivolous” grounds, as a “matter of prestige” or with an attitude of “vengeance” or “callousness bordering on vendetta”, displaying “arrogance and a superiority complex”. About the officials responsible for avoidable litigation, the Law Commission said that “the lack of accountability of the officer in whom the power vests to initiate litigation or perpetuate the same by preferring appeal, is largely responsible for mounting litigation ...cases are not unknown where corrupt motives may be at the root of the tendency to continue litigation so as to exhaust the other side in the fond hope that he/she may, out of exasperation, be willing to grease palms”. There is a third independent cause generating this tendency to initiate or perpetuate litigation and that is to avoid taking decisions.

But, regrettably, even after such an incisive report, there does not seem to be any change in the profligacy of government litigation. India has seen major transformations in many areas during these years. But few of these changes have been in the government itself, and the colonial mindset that set the bureaucracy apart from and above the ordinary citizen still continues.

The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, headed by Union minister for law and justice M. Veerappa Moily, observed that bureaucracy in India is generally perceived to be “unresponsive, insensitive and corrupt” and a common complaint against it pertains to excessive red-tapeism.

It’s not that there is a lack of data or inputs as to how to make the bureaucracy more effective and responsive. It is because there is so much over-protection in the law that we seem to have reached a dead-end. It is not that the government does not know how to deal with the deadwood. It is just that it won’t. The government has the absolute power to sack anybody. But there is not a single case where an inefficient or a corrupt official has been shown the door. Everybody wants a government job, as it gives lifelong job security, whether you work or not. At the end, you get pension for life.

This is apart from the corruption which a vast majority of bureaucrats indulge in. As per the statistics, 24,130 cases, under the Prevention of Corruption Act, were pending trial in Indian courts at the end of 2007. A large number of them range between 15-20 years.

Incidentally, 153 of the newly-elected MPs have criminal cases pending against them. Rajiv Gandhi once said, “Only Re 1 out of Rs 10 allocated to the poor is reaching them”. His son Rahul Gandhi, just before the 2009 elections, had said, “Only 10 paisa out of Rs 10 allocated to the poor is reaching them”. No amount of tall talk or big schemes is going to ameliorate the lot of the poor if all this money is to end with middlemen, bureaucrats, in a nexus with corrupt politicians.

The present laws have failed to either deter or prevent corruption and make India’s bureaucracy effective in its delivery system. The leaders should govern well and the lethargy and corruption should be weeded out by it, instead of waiting for the court judgments to come.

The government should put its own house in order before it can put the country in order. It should end the reign of clerk-o-cracy and substitute it with develop-o-cracy.
By Joginder Singh
* Joginder Singh is a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation
Our corrupt babus

Comment: Many Pension Parity cases won in courts by Military personnel- but corrupt babus prolong the cases for decades. Joginder Singh has rightly inferred that 75% court cases are litigation perpetuated perpetually by the State on its citizens. Prudently the courts should be safeguarding the citizens from corrupt babus and statistics should be reversed ideally.

Satyam Scam: Corrupt Corporate Code: Political- Bureaucrat Nexus?

Satyam Scandal Rocks Outsourcing...
Shocker from Satyam
Ramalinga Raju’s letter of admission came as a shocker to corporate India on Wednesday morning. Outgoing CEO of the IT major admitted fraud to the tune of Rs 40 billion and said that the balance sheets had been inflated for years. He admitted that Maytas deal was the last ditch effort to get value for the fictitious assets. The development is expected to have wide ranging impact and has sent ripples across Bombay Stock Exchange. The accounts of Satyam are expected to be sealed as the day progresses….

India Inc goes into 'deep shock'
CII President K. V. Kamath said there was a ‘need to immediately examine the loopholes in regulation, accounting, audit and governance that allowed such lapses to occur and address them with urgency’. He said corporate India must ‘reflect on ways to demonstrate its quality of governance and enhance the confidence of stakeholders.’
Satyam scam: Mega corporate fraud
India Inc goes into ‘deep shock’

Reduce corruption to reduce terror attacks

Government officers complain that they cannot help prevent corruption because the public is forcing it on them, doctors complain that they cannot help prescribing coslty medicines because only then their patients believe that they are being treated well. No doubt these are genuine complaints. There are a handful of people in this society who really want corruption to exist and doctors to prescribe costly medicines because they can afford it. But the important thing for us to take cognisance of the fact that the majority who bribe are those who cannot afford it and are forced to it by the majority of bribe takers. At the end of the day let us accept that it has become an accepted evil like dowry. But that doesn't still mean that the majority would not like to see it being wiped out. And it doesn't need any magical wand to do it.

It only needs our police and courts (including the quasi judicial bodies) to be made efficient and accountable. Unfortunately these have been rated the most corrupt and the second most corupt organisations in India today. And the law-makers are not even talking of making them accountable. In the case of the judiciary even a bill for including the executive in the process for appointing judges to high courts and supreme court is hanging fire for so many years now. And appointing judges is no deal when compared to the onus of making them deliver justice. I shall just quote two examples to prove how wayward out judiciary is.

1. In Jancy Joseph Vs Union of India (1999 (1) KLT 422), the question of applicability of Section 56 of the Civil Procedure Code while ordering arrests under the provisions of Section 27 of the Consumer Protection Act was considered by the Kerala High Court. Under Section 56 of the CPC,'the court shall not order arrest or detention in the civil prison of a woman in execution of a decree for payment of money; regarding recovery of money from others, arrest can be ordered if it is found that the person concerned have means to pay'.

The judge had ruled that 'I quash Ext P5 in so far as it holds that woman can be arrested for recovery of money under Sec 27 of the (Consumer Protection) Act and that means of judgement debtor need not be considered when the power under S 27 is exercised for recovery of money'. (Note: here the supposedly learned judge is NOT applying an exisitng law, he is making ONE!)

2. Subsequently, in Mary Chacko vs Jancy Joseph (2005 (3) KLT 925), a division bench headed by the then CJ of Kerala considered the issue of the applicability of the same Sec 56 of CPC while enforcing the orders under Recovery of Debts Due to Banks and Financial Institutions Act 1993 and ordered that women CAN be arrested because 'there is a clear basis for treating the public dues different from the purely private'. Now this raises a genuine doubt whether the Constitution of India, by which all these luminaries swear by, mention anywhere that justice should be denied to individual citizens? As I see it, or as any man in his senses would see it, it is a big NO! Doesn't it suggest that these people read the Preamble to the Constitution every time they opened a case file? As well as the Gandhi Talisman for added effect?

It was recently reported in the press that a division bench of the apex court had ruled against judges making laws instead of just interpreting them. Also, in a recent case filed in the District Court here by the wife of an advocate against her husband, the advocate literally argued that it would be shame for him to appear before that court and he got an advocate commission appointed to hear the case! And it was also reported in the media that the High Court of Kerala had said that it had refrained from directing the Chief Secretary of the State to appear in person because it did not want to insult him! And that in nutshell sums up the state of our justice delivery system. Can we hope to do anything unless this system is overhauled?

The Right to Information Act had actually opened a window of opportunity to set the system right, But the lawmakers dug the first nail on the coffin of the Act by appointing only those persons whom it could identify as potential murders of the Act as information commissioners- the watch dog for implementation of the Act. And between the information commissions and the judiciary, they are vying with each other to dig the last nail in! Today the information commissions are in the same state where the judicary has landed in 60 years. Dr Abdul Kalam when he was the President asked: why is it that all the undertrials in our prisons are from the marginalised sections of the society? (And all the scams that are being reported in the media involve the politician-bureaucrat nexus!). Today we may ask in the context of RTI Act: why is it that only PIOs of lowest level public authorities have been fined while the law provides for fining the PIOs of all the public authorities if they fail to give satisfactory reply within 30 days of the application?

There are moves a foot to amend the RTI Act. The publicised reasons are of course to make it more user friendly. But going by the history of the Consumer Protection Act we can rest assured that the last nail on the coffin of the Act will be dug by these amendments.

Maj PM Ravindran (Retd)