Ignoring the Jan Lokpal Bill proposed by the Civil Society, the government panel has put forward a lame draft of the Lokpal Bill. The government’s version is so riddled with holes that it puts Mysore Masala Dosa to shame. Individual popularity of the leaders and even their past successes do not guarantee that the Jan Lokpal Bill will be adopted. There are many vested interest in India who benefit from the current corrupt governance; ALL of the political parties, the bureaucracy, and the business class and to a lesser extent even the judiciary and the media. These interests have much to lose if the parliament passes the Jan Lokpal Bill. So it is logical that they will do everything in their power to scuttle the bill as they have consistently done for the past four decades.
Even if the Jan Lokpal Bill is enacted verbatim, corruption has a much longer innings to run. While India claims to be the birthplace of spirituality, civic responsibility appears to be missing from public consciousness as is evident by the state of public places in India. A lay person is as much a perpetrator of corruption as a victim. Overpopulation, widespread poverty and shortage of resources force people to find shortcuts to grabbing a service or a resource. The corruption has become primarily a cultural phenomenon as opposed to a legal or an economic one. The same Indians, who would bribe a policeman in India to get out of a sticky situation, quickly learn not to do it when they travel to the western countries. They stop littering on the streets.
A cultural curiosity in India is that people tend to respect those with authority. Perhaps it comes from the British rule of India where the rulers automatically commanded a lot of respect. The end result is that most people are unable to raise their voice against injustice. Couple this with a lack of knowledge of bureaucratic procedures and lack of awareness of their rights as citizens; you get a perfect recipe for governance without accountability. The other side of the coin is that a lot of people are either unaware or unwilling to discharge their responsibilities.
Many of the laws of the land are arcane and enacted during the times when there were no computers or media such as television. These laws and the resultant bureaucratic procedures do not make sense anymore, but they continue to haunt the citizens anyway. Bureaucrats and politicians continue to use and misuse them for their own nefarious purposes. Computerization and automation have increased the transparency to a certain extent, but for the people who are not computer literate, the bureaucracy is still a bewildering labyrinth of procedures and delays.
When India became a republic in 1950, we replaced a system of unelected monarchs with the one of elected monarchs. Every people’s representative is a monarch in his or her own right, not to mention an MLA or MP. Almost every representative and babu in India has a shocking sense of entitlement to public money. They also tend to show utter contempt for the public opinion. For example, it has become commonplace for politicians to declare assets in crores (ten millions) of rupees before the elections. After every term their net worth goes up 200-300%. They brazenly claim that they supporters voluntarily donated those millions. Any major legislation that puts brakes on corruption will hit the very foundation of our current politician-bureaucrat-businessman-criminal nexus. To expect the same set of people to take steps to contain corruption is downright ludicrous.
Corruption is not just a minor inconvenience of having to pay bribes. It also results in a crippling inefficiency in the delivery of services, development of infrastructure and utilization of scarce resources in the public domain. With the widespread availability of social networking tools such as Facebook, there is no reason why Indians should continue to suffer the wholesale injustice. Internet could be used to share information about governance, exchange effective measures used to tackle corruption at the individual and collective levels, to keep track of locally elected representatives such as corporators, MLAs and MPs, and to encourage debates of local and national issues during pre and post election times between various candidates and the public.
Many people are not aware that a municipal ward is the smallest unit of governance in urban India. It is the closest a citizen encounters the government on a daily basis. A representative of the ward, typically a corporator, is responsible for the overall maintenance of the ward. Various local infrastructure and civic amenities are maintained at the ward level. Some examples are: roads and bridges, parks, sanitation and garbage management. These services are very badly managed in most areas, with a few notable exceptions. People are very aware of the poor state of affairs in their ward, but unaware of what to do or whom to contact. I am proposing a Facebook (or a similar tool) based movement (call it Facebook Andolan) that will provide a platform for the anti corruption movement. Such a platform can provide the following:
• List of local representatives, their agenda and biographies
• Local amenities and responsibilities
• Political and policy debates
• On going projects and project details obtained via RTI
• Corruption faced at various levels and resolution
• Local issues and resolutions
• Discussion forums
• Surveys
According to one statistic, some 32 million (as of July 2011) users of Facebook are Indian and growing at the rate of 4 million per month. Such tools provide a great meeting ground for Facebook Andolan. I believe this is a grassroots approach to tackling corruption. It has the following advantages:
• Engages people in taking responsibility for their communities
• Makes people aware of governance and their role in it
• Decentralizes power structure and brings it closer to people
• Addresses corruption at the lowest levels
• Decreases influence of vested interests
• Holds representatives more accountable for their actions or lack there of
Let there be a mutiny in every ward!
