Causes of corruption in INDIA

Corruption is one of the biggest threat to the well-being of a society.Corruption degrades the quality of the services and also ruins the life of the common man. India is one of the countries highly affected by this threat called corruption.

Unlike like developed countries, corruption is at high rate in India. The causes of corruption in India are many and quite complex that the promises of the political parties to eradicate corruption is not easy.Corruption is primarily seen in instances like jobs, businesses, promotions, election campaigns, sports etc. Below is the list of causes in my view:

 Causes of corruption in India

1. Low Pay scales/ Wages: Most of the employees in government sector are paid low wages and salaries. Hence some employees revert to corruption for more financial benefits.

2. Low Job opportunities. This is another cause of corruption. Due to lack of job opportunities at will, there are many people who like to go for corruption mode to get the job offer. They will be ready to pay lump some amounts for the job offer to the higher officials or politicians.

3. Lack of Strict and fast punishments: Even if some one is found guilty or even caught red-handed by the anti-corruption officials or media, the convicts get less punishment. First they will be suspended for few months or weeks and then re-posted to another location with same Job grade and pay. So this means the official who did the corrupt practice is given a free licence to continue his practice.

4. Lack of ill fame: If a person is found to be corrupt or has done some unacceptable misconduct, he or she has to be avoided and not be respected. But in India those with corruption and other offence related history are given prominent positions like the member of parliament or even higher posts. Instead of being disrespected they are respected.

5. Lack of Unity in public: Public openly criticize corruption but interestingly there is no unity among the public to stop corruption. If a person wants to get his done his work, he gets it done by corruption means if possible and then later criticizes the  corrupt official. If the public stands united against corruption in such a way that no one is ready to offer bribes to get their work done then the corrupt officials will have no other option but to work in corruption free manner.

During election, politicians try to lure the people by offering money and other things. If these politicians win and get power, they try to regain 10 to 100 times the amount spent for their elections.

6. Lack of transparency in affairs and deals: Many seat selection processes like in education, contracts for job, employee income reports (wealth possession), etc lack transparency. For this purpose, there is a new act namely RTI : right to information, but the act is not strong enough to prevent malpractices.

7. Lack of Independent detective agency: India has no independent detective agency which can investigate with full power and freedom to expose the corrupt individuals. The existing agencies like Central Bureau of investigation are named by the highest court of Indian judicial system as a parrot which indicates how free these investigating agencies to work. Hence any one who commits offence will not be so afraid of the investigation as they  can escape from it by taking help of ruling political party.

8. Option of many political parties: In India anyone can establish a political party. So there are many political parties in India. If the political party wins, then the members in it will desire to expand the party to all over the country. To do so, they need enough financial reserves. For this, once they come into power, they opt for corrupt means to make the wealth needed to expand the party.

9.Lack of enough powers to the judicial system and other independent organisation.  Like the election commission cannot ban a politician from contesting in case they make a mistake or do not comply with the rules during election campaign (like distributing money to people etc). Similarly, the judicial system has low options to punish some one who is found to be

10. Lack of accountability: In government there is a big trend of corruption. This is because of lack of accountability. The employee’s on government offices do not perform to their par excellence. If they receive 100 files to be cleared in a week they may not even clear 50 of them in that week. They tend to post-pone the clearance of the files. So those who are in urgency of the clearance have to get them done by rewarding the officials involved in the clearance office. This lack of accountability in government offices is chief cause of corruption.

If there is a mandate that all the files or at-least 95% of files received by government offices for clearance are cleared in the said period than corruption can be minimised to a large extent.

11. Encouragement of unhealthy competition: Competition in business is a good sign for quality of service to be delivered. But in India there is encouragement of unhealthy competition.

When there is a tender, you can notice that only few companies bid for it. This is because the companies having political relations have higher chances of winning while others do not. So, companies with no political influence will not bid for the tender in-spite of being a good company.That is here the number of bidders for a tender will be low due to political interference.