corrupition is of all kinds - including intellectual corruption. Claiming credit for drafting 80% of the RTI Act is nothing but outright dishonesty and knowing that people involved in drafting the law for decades will not come and bicker on TV screens .
----- Original Message -----From: IAC INFOSent: Sunday, November 04, 2012 9:55 PMSubject: [hum] Corruption not the sole problemA provocative article by a former Doon School headmaster selling the familiar Congress theme - corruption is not the problem, poverty is ('Bhrashtachar badhao garibi hatao'). Ajay
Corruption not the sole problem
KANTI BAJPAI
Going by the Indian media, the greatest problem in the country is corruption. A content analysis of Indian television and newspapers and magazines will almost certainly show that the single largest item is corruption. Is corruption the most consequential problem facing the people of India? Not so. The obsession with corruption is a largely middle-class preoccupation, a type of middle-class diversionary tactic.
Corruption is a bad thing, obviously. The scale of it today seems monumental, though no one has showed that it is any worse than under previous governments. To say this is not to excuse the UPA government, which clearly has to do much more to rid the system of dishonesty and illegal moneymaking. What is true is that the media today is far more vigilant and the government more porous than in the past. We therefore hear a lot more about corruption than we did before, and we tell ourselves that things have never been worse.
Actually, if someone monetised and counted the number of dishonesties and the amount of illegal moneymaking, we would probably find that on a per capita basis, corruption is not much worse than in earlier periods. If we discounted for inflation and growth rates, it has most likely been remarkably stable. Indeed, it is an even bet that the totality of corruption, big and small, has actually dipped, given the freeing up of the economy from the licence permit raj and the improvement in surveillance technologies.
Why then is the middle class preoccupied with corruption to the exclusion of all other pressing social issues? There is a long list of far more immediate and long-term problems that are vital to the well-being of ordinary Indians. These include the availability of food, water, housing, electricity, fuel, affordable and safe public transport, basic health amenities, banking facilities and participation in local municipal decision-making, amongst others. How many stories will you read about these issues in the English language or Indian language media? Very few.
The middle class controls the media in terms of ownership, viewership and readership, and the personnel in charge of these organisations. It does not want to be reminded that the vast majority of Indians live in squalor; a squalor so deep that few places on earth, even in the most deprived parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America can match it. It is not that middle-class Indians do not know this. They just do not want to be reminded of it. And the challenges of removing this squalor seem so massive and unsettling to their lifestyles that they would rather focus on something more tractable. Corruption fits the agenda of what seems controllable.
Why does corruption fit the bill so well? For one, it seems like a finite problem. After all, how many really, truly corrupt people are there in India? In the middle-class and upper-class imagination, the number is not large: all MPs, MLAs, senior civil servants, and fat-cat corporate executives. Count them up and that comes to a few thousand - easy enough to deal with. Compare that to the hundreds of millions who must be helped out of poverty.
Corruption is also attractive as a target of middle-class ire because it cuts across caste, class, religious, regional, generational and gender divides. Who could be against fighting corruption except the corrupt? No great political and social compromises are necessary here. Everyone is against corruption and, therefore, campaigns against it are relatively painless. Corruption is unifying.
A campaign against corruption draws people to it also because the major targets are easily enough identified - politicians, officials, business executives. They are greedy and venal, and no troubling social analysis is required to unearth the causes of the phenomena. What is the cause of India's poverty, abysmal human development and deplorable quality of life? These are much more difficult and dangerous questions to answer.
Corruption is not the only or even the greatest challenge facing India. It does need to be controlled. But a hysterical, exclusive focus on it by the media, activists and the public is wrongheaded.
permalink: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-07-23/edit-page/29803212_1_corruption-middle-class-indians
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