Sunil Sethi: Corruption begins at home

AL FRESCO

Raj Kishore Singh is 28 years old and left his village in district Darbhanga of Bihar nine years ago to find a new life in Delhi. His father's landholding had shrunk to a miserable two hectares, either flooded or parched for part of the year, and he was lured to the Capital by a cousin who promised him a "good job". This turned out to be an illusion; he was first apprenticed as a garage mechanic""sharing a room with six fellow Biharis in a Delhi slum""and then moved up as a car driver. Raj Kishore hasn't fared so badly: he has built a house on a tiny plot in a resettlement area for the erstwhile slum dwellers, got married and had a child. But like the hundreds of thousands of migrants who pour into Delhi each year, his troubles are far from over.

Quite often, sometimes for several days in a month, Raj Kishore is absent from work. On these days his life is governed by a string of loan sharks, touts and petty agents, acting privately or in collusion with local authority. For months it was a struggle to acquire a pehchan patra, an identity card, necessary for recent arrivals who have acquired land in resettlement colonies. Bribes plus collective pressure on the MLA managed to legitimise his existence in the city. Now he queues for long hours to own a ration card""for subsidised sugar, rice and kerosene supplies""and is obliged to pay off parasitical go-betweens attached to the public distribution system. Ahead lie battles for a cable TV connection, a voter's card, a simple medical insurance and schooling for his daughter.

Despite""perhaps even because of""the large network of recent migrants that dominate the changing demographic profile of the National Capital Region, life in Delhi according to Raj Kishore is infinitely more corrupt than back in Darbhanga. Sometimes he longs to throw in the towel and return to his meagre farming plot.

According to a Corruption in India study conducted by Transparency International in 2005, common citizens of the country paid bribes totalling Rs 21,068 crore in a year to avail themselves of everyday public services. The study, said to be the largest ever undertaken, was based on a sample of 14,405 respondents across 20 states, covering 151 cities and 306 villages. Three-fourths of those interviewed believed that corruption had galloped ahead from the previous year. Bihar was judged the most corrupt state in the country followed by Jammu & Kashmir. Kerala stood out as the least corrupt state.

As it happens, the India chapter of Transparency International gave out its first media awards for exposing corruption last week""instituted in the memory of the late hotelier MS Oberoi""and the gold medal went to the reporter who uncovered the Bihar flood relief scam. But the prizes concentrated on big corruption scandals such as cash-for-queries by MPs. The organisation's report, though, focuses on 11 specific public services that plague the daily lives of people like Raj Kishore.

The police come out tops as the most corrupt entity in Indian life followed by the lower courts, land administration and municipal services. Corruption in government hospitals had mostly to do with non-availability of medicines and securing admissions. Despite reforms, electricity services figure high on the corruption index. Corruption in the PDS system has to do chiefly with leakages""endless waiting and palm-greasing to acquire a ration card are no guarantee of a regular supply of clean rations.

But you don't have to delve deeper into the study to see how well-regulated and "democratic" the giving and taking of bribes is. "Both the giver and taker are familiar with the modalities," the report points out. Raj Kishore carries a fixed chart in his head of the extra "fee" any service will cost him. Like charity, he knows that corruption begins at home.