How corruption kills you and me people

As the Government blows hot then cold on including the lower bureaucracy into the Lokpal Bill’s ambit, my widowed maid bringing up a family of six on an anorexic single income, has been running from pillar to post to get her son a Government job in compensation for her husband’s death on duty.

It has taken her 14 years, yes that’s equal to a life term, to get the DDA to finally send her the letter of appointment in her son’s name. Many in queue after her got similar jobs in the department by allegedly paying off the officials a sum she could never gather due to her hand-to-mouth existence.

When the letter came after 14 long years of her husband’s death, she was overjoyed enough to burst into tears of joy — only to realise sometime later that these would soon turn into tears of sorrow yet again. Besides, of course, the fact that the official at Vikas Sadan made her run for papers (when she would give one, he would ask for another and so on, not giving her the full list of the papers they required for letting the boy join), after five to six months, she was finally told everything is in order and now all she needed to do was to get a medical certificate of fitness of her son from a Government doctor.

It has been over three months and she has been running yet again from pillar to post trying to get a Government doctor to duly examine and give the certificate to her son. No doctor in seven of the Government hospitals she has visited is willing to give one! Can you believe it? Even for getting a medical certificate, she now feels she will have to run for another life term to get this piece of paper. Finally, she has now taken an informal loan to pay one of the doctors at a Government hospital to get the certificate. This doctor has been clear in telling her he is charging her a smaller amount because she is ‘garib’! And well, he has done half the examination taken the money and gone off, telling her that for the rest she needs to go to the fellow on the next desk!

One knows, that cases like these are a dime a dozen and the bribe giver is as punishable under law as the bribe taker. But will you really blame this maid, for instance, for giving the money to procure a certificate for a job she and her family have waited for the past 14 years? It’s like sentencing a person for a murder in self-defence.

In this context, the inclusion of lower bureaucracy into the Lokpal Bill will only work for the benefit of the aam aadmi and clean up the quality of life. Why the Government will not want something like this is beyond anybody’s pale of imagination, unless of course organised corruption is something that the power people want to protect for some kind of self-gain. The Government’s argument is that it will be a logistical nightmare to handle 57 lakh Group C employees who will come under the Lokpal ambit. The other argument is that these 57 lakh officials are already being manned by the senior officers for any kind of dereliction of duty or for that matter corruption so why should another body like Lokpal man their work?

Well, the counter argument here is straight. If an honest Prime Minister like Manmohan Singh failed to curb the activities of an A Raja or a Suresh Kalmadi and host of others who brewed the corruption and the resultant million-dollar scams right under his nose, how effective a senior bureaucrat really is in curbing corruption? It’s here that a Lokpal will manage to do what an in-house disciplinary committee often fails to.

And in any case, the Government has shown how apathetic it is to common man’s views. The Ministers and the bureaucrats don’t have to go to that cussed and corrupt clerk to get their jobs done. It is people like my maid and the entire cloutless middle class that has to get work done at this level. And till the fear of Lokpal and instant inquiries and dismissals from service is taken out of the protective red tape it is cushioned in right now, there is hardly any hope for a clean, liveable society to crop up from the mess of wanton corruption that pervades it today.

So, before the Government gets cold feet in the middle of the night in putting the tough regimen through, it should wonder why is it so cussed in doing just a little bit at least in cleaning up the act of this nation. And till it gets that honesty of intention there is no hope in hell for us — as a nation, as a population or even as an individual who goes to the election booth and votes the same dispensation back to power, citing lack of choice.

Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 4, December, 2011