Sunil Sethi: A recipe for a cleaner society

AL FRESCO

When economists and political analysts speak of good governance they tend to veer off into vast generalities about the fault lines of Indian democracy, the glaring disparities between the rich and poor and the rampant failure of successive governments to deliver the bare essentials""food, basic education and healthcare""to India's teeming millions.

Here are three random samples picked from the papers recently:

A yojana announced by the new government to help the poorest of the Indian poor ward off starvation is the food-for-work programme.

One hundred and fifty of the poorest districts in the country have been identified where, it is hoped, that desperate, indigent villagers will be mobilised to march up the district magistrate's office and demand a sackful of grain.

But what is the guarantee that this scheme will be successfully implemented and not be frittered away like hundreds of other such schemes?

Some years ago it was ordained that every MP would have a yearly fund of Rs 1 crore at his disposal for specific development projects in his or her constituency; the fund was later raised to Rs 2 crore.

Although the money is to be dispersed through the local administration, a spate of reports suggest that it has been repeatedly misused by many MPs.

Cases have also come to light where MPs have failed to use the money at all. Why has Parliament failed to lay down a procedure of monitoring and accounting for this expenditure of thousands of crores? Have MPs found to be misusing the fund or leaving it unutilised ever be penalised or punished?

It is every Indian's birthright to acquire a passport without hindrance but the cess-pool of chaos and corruption unearthed by senior MEA officials at the regional passport office in New Delhi recently was a shocker.

Petty officials demanded bribes ("If you have the money to travel abroad, can't you pay a little extra?") as a backlog of thousands of uncleared passports piled up.

Peons were using the toilets to wash and hang their laundry and two lifts bore a notice that read: "Reserved for Officials Only".

In any other accountable democracy there would have been an outcry against the foreign minister, who is ironically an ex-IFS officer himself.

Won't he believe the testimony of his own senior officials? Why is his ministry incapable of providing the one public service it is supposed to at home?

These are some of my own examples but for a broader overview and some compelling arguments as to why corruption persists, why public services fail, and why there is so little accountability in Indian public life, read Bimal Jalan's The Future of India: Politics, Economics and Governance (Penguin Viking; Pages 212; Price: Rs 350) that is just out.

Rather, like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Dr Jalan is a former economist and planner who now has a frontal view of politics.

His last job was as governor of the Reserve Bank but he now is a member of the Rajya Sabha.

He has had to shift his gaze from tasks of formulating economic policy and foreign exchange regimes to the harsher realities of Indian life: "Why do the people of India, who have the right to vote freely and elect their government, not exercise greater vigilance over the conduct of their elected representatives? Why do they continue to elect corrupt ... with narrow interests?"

Revealing also is how the economist calculates the cost of corruption. In one his best chapters, aptly titled "The Supply and Demand of Corruption" Dr Jalan argues that "if there were no corruption, India's growth rate would have been nearly 8 per cent per annum in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than close to 6 per cent".

High corruption is inevitably linked to the wrong public projects and project delays; it is what pushes the poor deeper into the poverty trap: "Anti-poverty projects tend to be guided more by the scope for graft...than their intrinsic costs or benefits".

From an economist who spent years in the thick of state planning, Dr Jalan is now an ardent reformer: he advocates greater free enterprise, less government, and a clean-up of the civil administration and judiciary.

Why is there no swift procedure to punish errant or corrupt officials? Why should judges' salaries be linked to those of civil servants rather than to what lawyers of similar experience earn?

Above all, he argues that if reform is at the root of good governance, then political will is the key. But unlike other economists who have come full circle, Dr Jalan advocates caution: India must evolve its model for reforms and implement them at its own pace.