Corruption, RTI and E-governance

It is known that Lokpal Bill (LPB) has been pending before our parliament for a long period. No governments have shown any interest to enact the same because the rulers do not want to be booked for their corrupt practices. The rulers wanted to move freely on their corrupt track. Let us hope that Hazara's drive and subsequent developments will be a catalyst in forcing the Manmohan Singh government to pay attention on adopting LPB with inputs from the civil society. No government can blind towards the belligerent public opinion. We the people of India have to be vigilant against any move to diluting the core of LPB.

Corruption Free Governance as Infrastructure

The modern governments with democratic system are very keen on economic development keeping eye on boosting up Gross Domestic Product (GDP). With this view, the governments have been keen in developing infrastructures like power, road, water, port, railway 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 are several 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.

Since the corruption free governance is the most powerful catalyst like any other infrastructure that facilitates economic growth, it must be taken into account as a fruitful infrastructure. Unlike any other infrastructural development, making corruption free governance needs a little outlay.

Since corruption has been inundated with democratic form of governments, political executives have to be ideal insulating from corrupt practices. The political executives have pivotal role in revitalizing the administrative mechanism and it should not leave any space to compromise with the working of the bureaucracy which must be recognized as an engine for development and economic growth. In other words while the political executives themselves keep away from corruption, the bureaucracy will be afraid to indulge in corruption. In such a context no chance to surfacing the nexus between political executives and bureaucracy and it eventually will result in good governance which is essential for a sound track of development of country like India. 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 drain out the trust of governance and derail the whole development process.

Governance must be transparent and effective in order to ensuring time-bound delivery of service. Transparency in governance is the key factor as far as the growth of a country is concerned. Here the people run from 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 stipulated time. On the other hand; influential person(s)/institution (s) will also be forced to bribe and, however, they are not bothered about the bribe but the speedy execution of their project. This is the situation is made use of 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 case of small-scale/medium scale firms. They may not be well-off to pay bribe for getting their services delivered. In such 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 corers/ year. Another survey commissioned by Hong Kong based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranks India as the fourth most corrupt nation in Asia Pacific region. These surveys warn that the governance in India needs to be rebuilt its trust that has already lost.

Whistleblowers Protection Bill

There are reasons to believe that all the public servants are not necessarily regarded as corrupt. Upright public servants are there as whistle blowers, 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 whistle blowers. 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 the country.

It is no need to search for such malicious incidents in other states of India. Such startling example can be seen here in Kerala itself. General manger of Malabar Cements in Palakkat, Sasidaran, and two of his children were allegedly murdered for raising his voice against the massive corruptions in the company. In this awful context the pending Whistle blowers Protection Bill aiming to protect the upright officials (whistle blowers) is required to be enacted in the wake of the pressure mounted on Lokpal Bill that is expected to be enacted in forthcoming parliamentary session.

Repeal age-old laws

It is right the RTI Act has been a tool in exposing the wrongdoings of administrative system comprising ministers and bureaucracy to certain extent. However it is not strong enough to pinch the corruption from its originating point. Sometimes the senior officers are forced to blind towards the wrongdoings, including corrupt practices, nepotism and favoritism of ministers, 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 etc. All these laws must be repealed or amended for making the administrative system transparent. It is the time to notice that an outcry demanding to repeal the law of sedition has been come up in the wake of Binayk Sen case.

UNCAC

In the wake of the issue of enacting Lokapal Bill, India should give priority in respect of the ratification of United Nation Convention against Corruption (UNCAC, in which India is already a signatory. The resolution passed by UNCAC urges to all signatories to make legislation suitable to their own state for curbing rampant corruption. The resolution of UNCAC has several robust provisions including to bring back the ill-gotten money deposited in various banks in overseas and to protect the upright public servants. And its provision intending to curb corruption in private sector is also significant one.

E-Governance

It was commendable step that National e-governance Plan (NeGP) was formulated aiming to “make all Government services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency & reliability of such services at affordable costs to realise the basic needs of the common man.”(www.arc.gov.in/11th report/ARC_11th rep_Ch7.pdf)).

Government of India allocated US$ 4.92 billion in budget allocations in the Tenth Five Year Plan (2002-07) for implementation of e-governance and it proposed the National E-governance Action Plan (2003-2007) to laying the foundation and providing the impetus for long-term growth of e-governance in the country. Every government department is expected to invest 2% of its budget on e-government (http://www.csi-sigegov.org/1/9_409.pdf).

As part of office automation and e-governance process, during late 80s itself, the respective state governments spent a lot of money for purchasing computers and allied hardware. But no governments can claim that all have been utilized as projected. And it must be noted that all those computers and hardware have already become obsolete, incurring the loss of cores of rupees to public exchequer. In other words, the most celebrated e-governance process is yet to be reached to its goal.

Even though India has been outlaid cores of rupees to promoting E-service delivery in every financial year, the rulers lacks robust vision in respect of its proper implementation. There is a proposed Electronic Delivery of Service Bill(ESD Bill 2011) aiming at the effective and speedy implementation of E-governance. It is a fact that the national e-governance plan (NeGP) of India has failed to bring the desired results despite cores of public money wasted upon it. Until the electronic delivery of service gets mandatory, the true effectiveness of E-governance process will be a mirage. And it is unfortunate that there is no such provision in the proposed Bill (http://cjnewsind.blogspot.com/2011/04/draft-electronic-service-delivery-bill.html). However it would be another deliberate attempt made to the ineffectiveness of the Indian parliamentary as well as administrative system.

Take the case of Kerala. Without any hesitation, it can be said Kerala is the pioneer state as regards to implement e-governance process. KELTRON, during its golden days, was authorized to explore the possibility of the computerizing government office as part of accelerating the pace of administrative machinery of Kerala. It is a fact that the speedy governance coping with ICTs leaves no space for administrative lethargy. Having made use of the space for making delay in delivering service, officialdom extracts bribe from the people who approach them for getting the service done. In other words the inordinate delay gets translated into bribe by the bureaucracy.

E-Governance has a solid link with the better working of Right to Information (RTI Act-2005) and is expected to be a strong tool in making the Act more effective. E-Governance has pivotal role in respect of better working of RTI and both RTI and e-governance represent two robust strategies for the tackling of corruption in India.

RTI & E-Governance

When Right to Information (RTI-2005) got introduced, we the people of India expected that it would be a great boon to the working of Indian administrative system, but it is yet to be realized. The administration of RTI hardly shows a promising administrative practice making use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). It is a strong indication of that RTI Act is not going to be made effective and transparent as projected. Here, the citizen of India is forced to run from pillar to post, the administrative authorities including office of the RTI commission, for getting the right information. And this state of affairs leaves the citizen hopeless. In this juncture, if anyone is compelled to suspect that a nexus between the administrative machinery of RTI commission and the government machinery has already been developed, he/she could not be blamed. E-governance paves to a paperless government which ensures the speedy, transparent and effective governance. RTI is badly needed to be made fully operational with the appropriate information system using ICTs.





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