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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
N. Ram
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February 21 - February 23, 2021
Transparency International (TI) defines it as ‘a manipulation of policies, institutions, and rules of procedure in the allocation of resources and financing by political decision-makers, who abuse their position to sustain their power, status, and wealth’1.
The rulers had discovered a new, ‘scientific’, and apparently secure way of solving the problem: negotiate, specify, and collect a percentage of the transaction value as ‘commission’ on virtually every major deal signed by the government. Shell companies, offshore accounts, secret contracts, coded payments, and ways to bring the kickbacks, the dirty money, back to India had become part of an established modus operandi.
As we shall see in the following chapters, corruption today is pervasive, omnipresent, and diverse, covering every branch of the Indian state and key sectors of the economy. Everything about it suggests that it has become an intractable problem.
Corruption in India is almost as leaden a cliché as hunger. It is sanctified by the oldest of traditions: it is denied by nobody, indeed the totality and pervasiveness of Indian corruption is almost a matter of national pride… —James Cameron in Indian Summer, 1974
East India Company officials were the major perpetrators of corruption in India but the colonial narrative made it appear that it was an endemically corrupt society that had ensnared them in its coils.
When corruption is not conceptualized soundly, in relation to socio-economic, political, and cultural factors, but is presented in overly simplified moral terms, analysis of its causes and effects tends to go all over the place; and without accurate, theoretically sound and empirically backed analysis, prescription tends to be seriously flawed.
from the Adarsh Housing Society scandal, where the value loss to the government was ₹163 crore, through the 2G Spectrum scam (₹56,000 crore) to Coalgate (₹186,000 crore) and the Antrix Devas/ISRO Spectrum Allocation (₹200,000 crore) scandals; from the Taj Heritage Corridor scam (₹175 crore) to the Uttar Pradesh National Rural Health Mission (₹10,000 crore), the Maharashtra Irrigation Scam (₹35,000 crore), and Foodgrains scandal (₹35,000 crore).
Grand corruption is described by Transparency International (TI) as ‘acts of corruption committed at a high level of government that distort policies or the central functioning of the state, enabling leaders to benefit at the expense of the public good’.
Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money. —Kautilya, The Arthashastra, Part VI, 2.9.33
