The modern governments with democratic system are very keen on economic development keeping eye on boosting up Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For this, the governments have been paying keen attention in developing infrastructures like power, road, water and allied utilities. Nevertheless the pace of development doesn’t get marked on projection. What goes wrong? The bottlenecks come in the way of development ought to be found out. There may be numerous bottlenecks including lack of political will and sense of direction of rulers, inefficiency of rulers, lethargic administrative apparatus and so on. Here, corruption as a main impediment has been a curse to modern democracy.
Corruption free governance is the most powerful catalyst like any other infrastructure that facilitates economic growth. And corruption free governance must be taken into account as a fruitful infrastructure. Unlike any other infrastructural development, making corruption free governance needs a little outlay. But it must be remembered that the political executive has pivotal role in revitalizing the administrative mechanism and it should not leave any space to compromise with the functions of the bureaucracy which must be recognized as an engine for development and economic growth. If political executive indulge themselves in corruption, they cannot control or lead the bureaucracy, and such context will end up in nexus between the political executive and bureaucracy. This state of affairs, needless to say, will derail the whole development process.
Governance must be transparent and effective in order to ensuring the delivery of service in time. Transparency in governance is the key factor as far as the growth of a country is concerned. Here, the people run after every pillar to post to get their services delivered. It is fact that inordinate delay in delivering service always results in bribe. Needy will be forced to give bribe from his/her hard-earned money in order to be got delivered the service in time. On the other hand; influential person/institution (s) will also be forced to bribe and they are not bothered about the bribe but the speedy execution of their project. In fact, this is the situation is made use of for extracting bribe. Even though the influential persons/institutions give bribe, it doesn’t mean that they are consonant with the corrupt governance. In fact, there is no other option at all.
Take the cases of small-scale/medium scale firms. They may not be well-off to pay bribe for getting their services delivered. In such a context, they may be forced to give up the proposed project itself. Transparency International’s (TI), which advocates for corruption free governance, survey on corruption says that India is on 85th position out of 180 countries. TI says that the Indians pay bribes Rs. 21,068 cores/year in 11 Public Services and truckers pay Rs. 23,000 crores/ year. It is appalling one.
At the same time all the public servants are not necessarily regarded as corrupt. Upright public servants are there as whistleblowers, but they get trapped at any time. The colleagues with corrupt track and mafia, who avail the favour out of corruption, may endanger even the life of such whistleblowers. There are several instances in this regard. Sthyendra Dubey, Kanpur IIT product, senior most engineer of National Highway Authority of India (NAHI), who was assassinated for exposing rampant corruption related to the Golden Quadrilateral Highway Project, a flagship project of country. In this awful context the Whistle Blower Protection Bill is required to be passed in parliament.
It is right that the RTI Act has been a tool in exposing the wrongdoings of administrative system comprising ministers and bureaucrats to certain extent. However it is not strong enough to pinch the corruption from its originating point. Sometimes the senior officers are forced to close their eyes towards the wrongdoings of political executives because of certain laws which prohibit them to reveal or expose such wrong things. Despite India attained Independence 63 years back, India is even now using those laws, which served the East India Company, like Official Secrets Act, Evidence Act, Oaths of Secrecy etc. All these laws must be repealed or amended for making the administrative system transparent.
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