Industrialist feels that India has inherited corruption from the past

New Delhi The Indian government has been wracked by a series of scandals involving the sale of telecom licences, preparations for the Commonwealth Games, a land scam involving high level military officers, and improper property loans made by state-owned fin-ancial institutions.

It seems as if only the honest people are poor in India and want to get rid of their poverty by education, emigration to cities, and immigration, whereas all the corrupt ones are getting rich through scams and crime.

Noted industrialist Vijaypat Singhania feels that India has inherited corruption from the past. Corruption is not a new phenomenon in India. It has been prevalent in society since ancient times. History reveals that it was present even in the Mauryan period. Great scholar Kautilya mentions the pressure of 40 types of corruption in his contemporary society. It was practised even in the Mughal and Sultanate period. When the East India Company took control of the country, corruption reached new heights.

In modern times, corruption in India has become so common that people now are averse to thinking of public life without it. Singhania says India will need hundreds of Anna Hazares to even make a dent in deep-rooted corruption. "Not one, I dare say, it will take a hundred Hazares to even make a dent in corruption in India. Our thinking has changed and our values have degraded," he says.

Transparency index

Interestingly, India was ranked 95th out of 178 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index last year. Also it bracketed with countries such as the Philippines and Cambodia, rated the fourth most corrupt nation among 16 countries of the Asia Pacific region surveyed by leading Hong Kong-based business consultancy firm Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd (Perc).

In India, according to the report, civil and other local-level political leaders were found more corrupt than the national-level political leaders, with the former given a score of 9.25 and the latter slightly better at 8.97. Indian civil servants at the city level too were rated at 8.18, worse than the civil servants at the national level at 7.76.

Recently, in the book Corruption in India: The DNA and RNA written by Professor Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari, the public officials in India may be cornering as 1.26 per cent of GDP through corruption.