Corruption

Strategy to Fight Corruption

1-Aug-2006
Dear President (Dr. Kalam)

Parliament is again shaken by another wave of corruption by MPs. We are not surprised. It was a known fact for long time. Never before MPs are caught red handed. Mr. Advani is suggesting scrapping of MPLAD scheme because of this corruption. By the same logic we should also scrap question hour session in the parliament, scrap all the projects undertaken by pancyat, which is a den of India’s most corrupt people. These are all known. Now question is how to fight them. The solution lies in 3-point approach.

Heavy punishment – We should be ruthless on corrupt people. Transfer or suspension is not good enough. We must try to recover as much stolen money as possible by attaching the asset of the person concerned including all beneficiaries. Any person who has stolen more than Rs 10 lacs should be given life imprisonment. I believe all corrupt politicians, policemen, government officials, burocrats have stolen crores of money.
Deterrence - Quick identification of corrupt people with the help of technology such as lie detector, brain mapping and others. These technologies are reliable beyond reasonable doubt. If someone knows that he/she will be caught within couple of weeks, they will think ten times before committing the crime. I also suggest indicting the spouse if she/he has the knowledge of the corruption of their other half. Another form of deterrence could be mandatory questioning of MPs and MLAs and randomly selected police officers, government employees especially from income tax and customs once in a year for possible crime which may include misuse of power, money laundering, murder, rape, forgery etc. the number of people to be questioned in a pre emptive measure should run as high as 100,000 every year. In India we have estimated 8 to 16 million corrupt people. We are the 88th most corrupt nation in the world with CPI as low as 2.5. We should try to improve that number at least by 1.5 every year so that we achieve CPI of 7 by end of 2008.

Improving quality of life in the work place and personal life – In my view people becomes corrupt for the following reasons.

• Bad association. When we were young, we all had a very high moral ground until we meet greedy people who killed their conscious long back. So we need to introduce some kind of awakening class by some honest respectable persons like you or Dr. Singh. I firmly believe that even the most corrupt person always wanted to have dignified life in their subconscious state.
• Ugly work environment – have you ever been to any income tax office? I have been once. No sane people can work there – from dust to pile of papers to broken chairs to exposed electric wiring, it is just a hell. Last week I was watching inside of police stations in Bihar in the TV. If we had slightest respect for human being, we would not ask anybody to work in such a inhuman condition. I believe smart workplace will produce smarter people with positive outlook about life.

In order to promote quality of life I propose

• Increase of pay packet. Minimum CTC should be Rs 20,000 for a 5-member family with one earning member.
• Encourage people to live a little bit of luxurious life. Issue surprise gift voucher of R. 2,000 to Rs. 5,000 from brand names like WestSide or Van Husen or Reebok. It is very important to have some level of aspiration in life. Let people enjoy the joy of shopping in Shoppers Stop during festive session.
• Make the workplace look beautiful and enjoyable. There is a sharp difference in productivity between people working in a branch of SBI bank and branch of ICICI bank. We got to invest in the infrastructure of police stations, nationalised banks, post offices, block development offices and many other government offices. Currently they are just horrible.
• Let everybody vote for the most honest person within his or her department for that month every month. This will make other ashamed so that they will try change themselves.
• Elect person of the month in every department.
• Sack repeated non-performer and counsel low performer.
• Oversee punctuality i.e. ensure that everybody is working 40 hours a week. Outsource this job to a third party. I know there will be all round protest from the unions, politicians. But at some point government has to be firm. We have tolerated coming to office late and leaving early for last 40 years. Time has come to implement some basic discipline. I have seen in income tax office that people are coming between 10:30 to 11:00, then reading the newspaper or playing games in the computer for 40 minutes.
• Introduce quality assurance and quality inspection in every department of government organization be it police or banks or customs or others. It should be similar to what we do in our projects. It is not witch hunting. Objective is to find non-compliance and ensure compliance for the next time. Quality assurance and quality inspection must be conducted by an external agency and this should be a continuous process – monthly or bi-monthly.