Why did we miss the big elephant in the room?
The larger scams can wait. The new elephant in the room is the retail corruption that is corroding the vitals of the state. It is not a 'new elephant' but a very old one with a hoary history. Evidence collected through crowdsourcing of corruption complaints show that the total bribe paid by urban India is an easy 30 per cent more than the biggest scams since 1987.
Since we are basically an oral culture transmitting stories, tales and traditions from generation to generation without putting it on paper, we have missed the elephant which has been getting bigger and bigger in the room.
India Today, in a cover story titled The Bribe Republic has brought out the issue of retail corruption to a larger audience. It was possible by a painstaking work done by www.ipaidabribe.com for the past three years in collating or rather crowdsourcing the corruption reports from ordinary citizens. It is not surprising that a majority of the complaints (30%) relate to bribes paid to the police to get a verification done for a passport. It usually means that unless the police verifies that you are present and available at one address, you would not get a passport. A sure fire way for making money. Second, (25%) is money paid to the traffic police to overlook a minor traffic violation. Police is the first culprit, but property registration department is not far behind.
This is not at all shocking. Nor is it entirely new. It is common knowledge and it is an open secret in India. But the shocker comes in when the total bribe paid by adult Indians comes to a whopping 6,29,675 crores per year. And wait. India Today sums it up well. It is 320% more than the Income Tax revenues of the year and 2,151 per cent more than the health expenditure of the nation. It is 942 per cent more than the education budget and comes to around 6.3 per cent of our nation's GDP.
Chennai tops the list of corrupt cities. Delhi can take a breather. Money changes hands in Delhi but may be we are too harsh on the metropolis. Citizens there seem to pay a decent Rs 23,175 per year compared to the Rs 92,352 paid by a Chennaivasi.
Ipaidabribe.com has collated around 30,000 tales of bribe payers. These talk about paying bribes for marriage certificates, death certificates, school admissions, LPG connections and finally government jobs, where one can continue the chain of corruption.
It is the same tale known to every Indian. But how did we all miss this big elephant in the room? Perhaps because no one had bothered to collect the stories and put the facts in perspective.
Whenever you pay a bribe, record it or when you hear of one, help record it.
Maybe there are many elephants in the room.
Read the full report in India Today