Corruption in India

India is battling with the corruption cases in the recent past. Corruption in India became a huge reason for the debacle of the previous Congress Government. The recent government raised the pitch for cleaning India from Corruption but few results in hand even after considerable time. Recently there has been no new cases of corruption and only old being unearthed.  But this does not imply that corruption is on a decline.

If one goes out in India and ask even a layman the people will turn you upside down if you utter that Corruption is on the decline. In India, every person has to fight corruption as soon as one steps out of the home. The people have a bag full of stories with them of them fighting with corruption. Thus corruption is really a big problem and the cancer is spreading rather than being stopped or routed out. There have been various attempts by the government to reduce the menace but all in vain.

Before we go and look into the possible solutions we need to understand the corruption per se. There is no proper definition of corruption but let us assume that; Corruption is nothing but a broader term which includes everything that a person does illegally to hide his actions from the legal authorities either for completion of his work or to use the power of money to fasten his work.

Thus corruption per se is not an exogenous problem in the society that a person wakes up with the disease and starts doing corruption, rather it is an endogenous problem of the society. Corruption takes birth within the economy and is not externally imposed on it. Thus to look for the solution we need to look inside.

Corruption, in short, can be seen as an action which is enacted in the scenario of failure of the formal system to perform it. For example, if the system works efficiently and provides licenses in an efficient and transparent manner then the people will be less motivated to follow the path of corruption. Thus corruption solutions lie in improving the efficiency and transparency of the system.

Corruption in a society has both elements one who support it, because they are able to pay money and want their work to be done fast ; and the one who rejects it not on the pretext that they don't want to promote it ( though there are few such people who don't want to promote it ) because they don't have the money power to carry it forward. Thus improving transparency and efficiency will create an inbuilt scrutiny on the one has money power by the one who doesn't have money power. Thus in this way, there would be very less requirement of scrutiny by the government once an efficient and transparent system is in place.

Other ways to remove corruption is by changing the behavior of people. In such a scenario government can incentivize the honest people by providing them larger shares in such transactions if they provide evidence with a guarantee of anonymity by the government. Thus it will ensure that people are motivated to take steps to not accept corrupt practices in the society.
Thus fighting corruption is not so easy and the fight takes time to absorb in the society. What one requires is that we should have patience and follow it.