Corruption and Culture - A vicious circle India must break

Abigail Barr and Danila Serra, as a part of the Global Poverty Research Group, concluded in their brilliantly written paper on 'Culture and Corruption' in 2006 that 'Corruption is in part, a cultural phenomenon'. Their sample of 195 experimental participants originated from 43 countries ranging from some of the most to the least corrupt countries and included 4 participants from India. An interesting conclusion of the experiment was that there exists a significant positive correlation between the level of corruption and the likelihood of younger population engaging in corruption. This primarily arises as corruption gets internalized like other social norms and preferences by the inhabitants. This finding broadly reaffirms common sense thinking - if you are surrounded by a bunch of crooks all the time, chances are much higher you would end up crooked as well.

Since 1995 when Transparency International started publishing a 'Corruption Perception Index', India's score has improved from 2.78 in 1995 to 3.1 in 2011. However, most recent trend on the index has been disappointing.

India's score reached a high of 3.5 in 2007 and has since then rapidly declined to 3.1 in 2011. We stand 95th among 183 countries. Some of the other emerging countries like China (3.6), Ghana (3.9), South Africa (4.1), Cuba (4.2) and Costa Rica (4.8) fare much better than us in combating corruption. In the last 8 years of current Government, we have seen scams after scams unfolding on a regular basis, only difference being the magnitude. Widespread failure of the investigative agencies, often controlled by the same corrupt politicians leaves the Judiciary helpless in enforcing the rule of law due to lack of evidence. Getting caught and then let off on bail while the legal process drags on for years allows the corrupt to enjoy their ill-earned bounty while the common man keeps toiling for basic necessities of life.

This has created an air of immunity around corrupt behavior leading to India caught in a vicious circle. Because there is a large amount of corruption, the younger population internalizes and accepts corruption as a social norm and this perpetuates the benefit of corruption to the public servants. Waning public interest in Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption is a good example of how people seem to have accepted corruption as a part of life.

Given that more than 50% of the population is under the age of 25, this vicious circle must be broken with an iron fist, else we risk loosing everything we have achieved in the last 64 years as a young democracy. It is going to be a long fight but we need not loose heart. We need to look at emerging nations like Chile and Botswana that at present have bribery levels of even lower than some of industrialized nations. Many other developing economies like Hong Kong, China and Singapore have been able to transform themselves from being very corrupt to relatively clean within a reasonably short period of time.

For the same to happen in India, we need a grass roots movement like the ones launched by Ram Mohan Roy and Veer Savarkar to rid India of prevalent social ills. In addition to demand for stronger and independent oversight bodies, strong police force and efficient judiciary, we would need to get rid of government in many aspects of our life and take away their discretionary powers. Price controls, complex and opaque regulations and layers upon layers of bureaucracies has created a huge black market and an unorganized economy where only the privileged few win. Gross root movement against corruption must focus on revolt against government's control of our lives. This fight can start today with each and every one of us pledge not to pay any bribe and battle the system for our rights and at the same time fulfill our responsibilities as civilized citizens.