India Inc’s conscience keepers — a motley group of 14 influential business leaders — have once again written an open letter to the government seeking urgent judicial, police and land reforms to bring down corruption and improve the poor governance in the country.
Earlier in January, the same group which includes Wipro’s Azim Premji, Deepak Parekh of HDFC, Mahindra group patriarch Keshub Mahindra, Anu Aga of Thermax and former Reserve Bank of India chairman Bimal Jalan, along with former ICICI Bank chairman N Vaghul and former Hindustan Lever chairman Ashok Ganguly, had written a similar note after being deeply concerned about the “growing governance deficit and galloping corruption”.
“We feel there is no movement in the key reforms. Yes there has been some movement on the land acquisition or mining legislations, but they are still in the draft stage. Many would argue even they are tough to implement. Lokpal deals with corruption at high places. But we are now talking of corruption that is making life unbearable for the common man. It concerns everybody,including us” Deepak Parekh, chairman, HDFC told Business Standard.
This time, the group identified the strong nexus between certain corporate, politicians, bureaucrats and power brokers as “one of the greatest threats to Indian democracy”. They also urged the government to enact a legislation similar to the recent UK Bribery Act, which makes it illegal to offer, receive and fail to prevent bribery and extends culpability to the highest levels in an accused corporation.
This issue gains significance especially during the allocation of natural resources. In such cases, the group has endorsed the introduction of online auctions to improve transparency and prevent discretionary and irregular practices. The United Progressive Alliance government, in recent months, has been hit by a barrage of scandals involving such resources in sectors like telecom, coal and iron ore mining.
In the backdrop of a national debate on a stronger anti-graft bill demanded by social activist Anna Hazare and his supporters, the group makes an important distinction saying the Bill alone cannot be the answer to solve the menace of corruption. “It is only one small but critical step in the national task of weeding out the plague of corruption in India. The government’s draft of the Lok Pal Bill is intended to address episodic corruption, but is unlikely to have any significant impact on the day-to-day corruption which is insidious and demeaning,” says their open letter.
Echoing the views of Kaushik Basu, the chief economic advisor of the finance ministry, who recently wrote about “harassment bribes” or the ones ordinary people often have to shell out to get what is rightfully theirs in the day-to-day lives, the group highlights that for even the most routine transactions today, a common citizen gets impaired by corruption.
This impacts national productivity too as “similar cases of continuous daily harassment are widely faced by small and medium scale enterprises and numerous services and manufacturing entities”.
But the group admits that well-crafted laws will remain ineffective unless a proper redress mechanism is put in place. And in a country where over an estimated 30 million cases are pending, the problem becomes even more acute. It is, therefore, imperative to increase the number of judges and other judicial officers, modernise infrastructure and implement judicial reforms such as fast track, specialised courts, they said.
Jamshyd Godrej of Godrej and Boyce, Nachiket Mor, Yezdi Malegam, two former judges, BN Srikrishna and Sam Variava, M Narasimham and A Vaidyanathan are other members of the group.
