India's bureaucracy is the worst!!

India's bureaucracy is the worst in Asia, according to a report.

The report by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranks bureaucracies across Asia on a scale from one to 10, with 10 being the worst possible score. India scored 9.21.

India fared worse than Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and China.

The report said India's bureaucracy was responsible for many complaints businessmen had about India, like lack of infrastructure and corruption.

It also said that Indian bureaucrats were rarely held accountable for wrong decisions.

"This gives them [bureaucrats] terrific powers and could be one of the main reasons why average Indians as well as existing and would-be foreign investors perceive India's bureaucrats as negatively as they do," said the report, quoted by the Press Trust Of India news agency.

India's government has not reacted to the report.

Singapore remained the country with the best bureaucracy, with a rating of 2.25. It was followed by Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia.

A report in BBC. Here and Here and Here

Lokpal, shopping malls and an ordinary hawker

Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

Arundhati Roy in The Hindu. Here

Netas are as corrupt as Babus

Some years ago, at a literary festival in Mumbai, I agreed to take two of my fellow speakers, Deborah Mogach and Sam Leith, to a Parsi restaurant. We went to the only one I knew of in the area. It was late afternoon and the proprietor was pulling the shutters down as the last customers dodged the corrugated blinds and left.

“Closed,” he said in English.

“Sahebji, my friends have come all the way from England,” I said in Parsi Gujarati with just the right amount of entreaty.

“Not me,” he replied. “The cook is about to clock off.”

“Can I speak to him?” I asked.

He shrugged and let me in. I went to the open plan counter dividing the kitchen from the tables where the cook was pottering.“Will R200 persuade you to serve one more table. We’ll eat whatever’s going.”

“Wonderful to see you,” he said in a Parsi idiom. “Can you make it 250?”

“Done,” I said.

We were served dhan sakh and plenty more and as we ate the old Parsi gentleman, the proprietor’s grand-dad, his thick trouser-belt embracing his thin chest, came down the stairs and up to us.

“Are you English?” he asked.

Deborah and Sam indicated that they were.

“Do you know Elizabeth?” the old man asked.

“Which Elizabeth?” Deborah asked, thinking he was enquiring after an Englishwoman of his acquaintance.

“This present one. The queen.”

“Well, not personally,” Sam said.

“When you go back,” the old man said, “tell her the British have to return and rule this place. These bloody politicians say democracy, democracy and only loot money.”

Farrukh Dhondy in Hindustan Times. Here

Mother of all scams is not 2G but electrification of Indian Railways

The truth is that scams of much larger proportion were very much there even in the immediate post-independence India. Some got exposed, but some never. The most important difference is that with the passing of each year we have more and more means to know about them, therefore, we are able to know more about them.

The expansion of media, the emergence of strong bi-polar politics, enactment of Acts like RTI, judicial activism etc have made the common citizens more aware of various charges of corruption.

Today’s Suresh Kalmadi is in jail, but there might have been a Kalmadi––may be a much smaller in stature––during the 1982 Asiad Games too. But he could never be detected, thanks to weak media and opposition. Certainly everything was not hunky-dory then.

A senior railway official once commented privately that possibly the biggest scam in the country took place more than half a century back when the decision regarding the electrification of Indian Railways was taken. The decision in this regard was taken many years before the so-called Oil Crisis of 1973.

Today rail traffic gets stalled for hours and Accident Relief Trains could not reach the spot in time of emergency because the overhead wires get disconnected even after a minor mishap or derailment of one or two coaches.

Producing power to run electric trains requires lakhs of tonnes of coal every year. Huge dams were constructed causing environmental pollution and displacement of millions. Besides, the social cost it entails is much more than the amount spent on importing diesel.

According to that official the country may never be able to overcome the power crisis because these trains consume so much electricity. Diesel engines are equally efficient and powerful and do not pose any problem in reaching anywhere in the country in any circumstances. Incidentally, the first Rajdhani Express on electrified Howarh-New Delhi track introduced more than 40 years back was powered by diesel engine and it continued to do so for years. Even the US, China and many European countries prefer diesel engines over electric locomotives.

This whole exercise of electrification was taken under the influence of big lobbies––national and international. Yet nobody questioned it then and nor today some five decades later. But 2G Spectrum is on everyone’s lips.

Soroor Ahmed in Two circles. Here

The Roots of India's Antigraft Churn

The country has changed in the last 20 years. But neither the government nor civil society gets it.

India is undergoing a political upheaval. Anger over high-level corruption has become widespread in the past year, adding to Indians' frustration with everyday petty corruption. In an environment where no political figure seemed credible, activist Anna Hazare stepped in earlier this year and led a campaign for an anticorruption watchdog. Last month, he used a 13-day hunger strike to get his way for legislation to create this watchdog.

That doesn't mean the tumult has ended. The elites in power are misdiagnosing the situation, throwing up tired answers to graft. But the alternative solutions offered by the likes of Mr. Hazare are out of touch too. Neither side seems to understand the kind of change India has experienced in the last two decades.

In the past, India's government ruled in relative secrecy and was ensconced in a rigid hierarchy. Even though New Delhi was accountable at the end of the day to the electorate, it presumed that the millions of files that documented the minutiae of regulations and ministerial actions would remain hidden from public gaze. It also presumed those affiliated with the central government wouldn't challenge it.

Twenty years ago, moreover, India's middle class was firmly allied with the state. These professionals held positions in the higher bureaucracy or in other state institutions.

The first tectonic movement is where the middle class stands today. They have been the biggest and most immediate beneficiaries of liberalization in the last twenty years. They have no reason today to stick up for the state. In fact, Mr. Hazare is joined by middle-class professionals, who have made the anticorruption movement savvy and media-friendly.

The watchdog Mr. Hazare is asking for would have the ability to go after almost any public official for wrongdoings: essentially one single institution, with a vast bureaucracy at its disposal and with overweening powers. This idea presumes that concentration of power is going to be more effective. But divided power is already generating better incentives for different institutions to hold each other in check. What's worse, Mr. Hazare makes no mention of economic or administrative reform, which would reform the role of the state in problematic sectors like telecom and mining.

This suggests that the battle against corruption is far from over. In fact, the great churning in Indian governance, as people search for better representatives to deliver growth without graft, has just begun. The movement Mr. Hazare galvanized may have erred in the direction in which it moved, but the sentiments underlying it are genuine.

The big risk here is that the likes of both Mr. Singh and Mr. Hazare will not understand the roots of this churning. India now has a government without credibility and a civil society offering non-solutions. At this rate, instead of artful reform, India will get draconian legislation.

Bhanu Pratap Mehta in Wall Street Journal. Here

Social Fascism, Anna Hazare and A Raja

Social fascism becomes the reality of a civil society that constructs a moral basis of its own. A middle class like the Indian one, which has erected strong caste enclosures around itself, looks for morality to serve its own interests. Corruption in general becomes a buzzword of condemnation within its day-to-day discourse, despite the fact that it lives with corrupt practices on a daily basis. For example, a middle-class government or NGO functionary does not hesitate to take Rs 1 lakh or more as salary, plus thousands of rupees of honorarium and sitting fees, but that same person would treat a chaprasi, who works for a Rs 5,000 monthly salary, as corrupt if he/she asks for Rs 200 for extra work.

The civil society that led the anti-corruption crusade also does not see corporate houses paying hundreds of crores of bribe money as corruption, but, a minister, an MP or a government official, who takes such bribe money is seen as corrupt because the corporate houses are still in the hands of “their people”, while the political and bureaucratic positions are slipping into the hands of people who are “corrupt by birth”.

Take, for example, A. Raja and Kanimozhi. They are treated as corrupt but the corporate houses that gave kickbacks and took huge contracts at throwaway prices are not treated as corrupt. The same corporate houses and their media boxes have been mobilising civil society of Gandhi topi into maidans to fight corruption.

Kancha Ilaiah in Deccan Chronicle. Here

Anna Hazare wants to subvert democracy

A theory has been put forth, and is being recycled continuously, that it is the political awakening of the new Indian middle class, a middle class often decried for its apathy towards the Indian state and democracy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is not the political engagement of the new middle class with India’s democratic system and processes. It is in fact a rejection of India’s democratic politics of 64 years. The message driven home has been: the elections and elected representatives don’t matter, the middle class votes don’t matter — because in any case, either the poor sell the vote or the rich buy out the politicians. There is no need for middle class to engage with the system. The system should instead be captured or subverted by street protests and public blackmails, with the help of the news television channels which can act as a force multiplier. When you mobilise supporters telling them that their votes don’t matter, and only street protests and blackmail do, these people are not going to stand up in queue to vote in the next elections.

It is for this precise reason that the current agitation is different from the earlier political movements in this country —- one led by Jai Prakash Narayan against the emergency imposed by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975, and the other launched by Mr. V.P. Singh against corruption in 1987. Both were ‘political’ movements where the leaders were proposing an alternative political formulation in front of the electorate. By seeking votes against the ruling establishment, they were reposing their faith in India’s democratic system. In contrast, Mr. Hazare’s handlers are self-righteous activists with a disdain for politics and politicians. The basic belief arising from the nature of their work with the NGOs is that politics and government cannot deliver, and only they can do a better job. In following their beliefs, the current movement is being assiduously apolitical, where its leadership is subverting — if not overtly rejecting — the democratic institutions like the Parliament and established legislative processes.

With its implicit message of subversion in a democracy, it illustrates the paradox of the current movement. The enthusiasm and commitment of the people in coming to the streets for a non-sectarian cause in a democracy is breathtaking. Yet this is a movement without an agenda beyond pushing its own version of the Jan Lok Bill. It could bend towards a new political party the way V.P. Singh’s Jan Morcha evolved into the Janata Dal, or it could be sophisticatedly co-opted by the UPA government as a new National Advisory Council. The essential truth is that nobody can predict just where this upheaval is heading. The political parties are being wise in moving carefully — and avoiding the facile embrace of a movement whose trajectory is unknown.

We are in the danger of ending up with an even more disillusioned and disenchanted middle class which doesn’t believe in a social contract with the Indian State. While the existing social contract seems to have lapsed, there are no alternatives being articulated by the leaders of the current movement.

A scathing comment on Anna Hazare by Pragmatic Desi. Here

Top Ten Reasons Anna Hazare shouldn't have waged a war on corruption

Top Ten Reasons Anna Hazare shouldn't have waged a war on corruption

10. Corruption is omnipresent in India.

9. Without giving bribe nothing happens in India. You cannot get your birth certificate or death certificate without giving bribe. You cannot get cremated without giving bakshish..

8. Indira Gandhi has famously said once that corruption is international phenonmenon.

7. Corruption is ingrained in the blood of Indian.

6. Indians would prefer to bribe the TT and get themselves a berth or seat rather than altering the travel plan.

5. Corrupt practices are part and parcel of the Indian mythologies. Remember When Karna took his powerful weapon, Nagastra and shot it at Arjuna. Krishna saved Arjuna from certain death by his divine powers; by subtly lowering Arjuna’s chariot into the earth, through a gentle pressure of his feet.

4. Hypocricy is ingrained in the blood of Indian. India is the only country where everything from river to wealth and knowledge are worshipped as female gods. India is also the only country to have massacred crores of girl childs in a decade 

3. Corruption cannot be eradicated by framing stringent laws alone. In India there is a law that those who indulge in spurious drugs should be hanged to death. Not a single soul has been hanged till today. The spurious drug industry is thriving with 5000 crore turnover annually. Besides nobody could deny the threat of it being misused. Janlokpal Bill would become another POTA or TADA

2. Indians would find ways and means to buy Lokpal or Janlokpal whatever.

1. There are more pressing issues facing the nation: Suicides of farmers, scarcity of drinking water, rising unemployment, threat of Hindu Fascism, collapse of family system, onslaught of western culture etc.

 Wake up Anna Hazares! It is better late than never.