Causes of Corruption in Indian Bureaucracy

By Deepak Parvatiyar

July 15, 2014

• During my college days, quite a few of my friends wanted to crack the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) for a bizarre reason – an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer would fetch more dowry than anybody else!
• A politician friend of mine, upon becoming a first time minister after winning the elections, compared his babus with Aladdin’s jinn who were more than eager to fill the coffers of their political master, including their own
• A professor of financial management at a top ranking institute of the country, after holding a workshop for some senior bureaucrats, was visibly annoyed by a participating bureaucrat who wanted him to teach ways of managing unaccounted money worth crores.
• An upright Indian Police Service (IPS) officer said he could not stop his juniors from indulging into corrupt practice because he could not risk them deserting him in a riot-like situation.

A newly recruited sales tax officer confides that though he does not demand any bribe, but he has to accept a fixed cut through the channel comprising his juniors. The examples cited above are not meant to demean the Indian bureaucracy. They don’t just highlight the prevailing corruption in administration but also are pointers to the causes that encourage corruption. It is an irony that a social stigma (read dowry) motivates someone to qualify the UPSC exams. Similarly, the babus’ eagerness to cultivate a neta, is only an attempt to exploit public money for vested gains.

With an ever growing number of scams, this unholy nexus of politicians and bureaucrats put the whole mechanism of probity in public life under a scanner.

This also triggers the debate on the question of accountability of a government servant.

In the early nineties, as a young journalist I remember attending an interactive meeting between a visiting American professor and some top bureaucrats of the Maharashtra government in Mumbai (then Bombay). To her seemingly simple question that who these senior IAS officers were accountable to, led to a serious introspection by these officers. Given the reputation of the professor, everyone realised that there was much more beyond this innocuous looking question and therefore they all looked beyond the obvious answer that they were accountable to the Constitution of India (whatever it means), and debated on the merits of a bureaucrat’s loyalty to the political leadership and the public as well. This small interaction with a scholar and top bureaucrats led me to believe that while it is easy to blame the babus for all the wrongs in the society and the government, it is the system that makes things confusing even for a top bureaucrat and for any of us!

Just look at Scenario 1: You might be an official in the Home ministry for a couple of years, then with the PMO for two years, and then you might suddenly be appointed head of a statutory Board or even sent to a different district as collector. You may be a brilliant officer but then it takes time to understand and master work.

Now look at Scenario 2: Instead of linear progression which is the norm in any industry, in case of a civil servants, no matter how intelligent they be, by the time they manage to understand the department and how to design policies to improve it, the transfer order comes. And what happens to all the ideas? It’s a classic case of ego-driven decision making.

There is little doubt that the top bureaucracy represents the brightest and best that India has to offer. These civil servants occupy a unique position because only the President of India can fire them. And yet, they crawl if politicians ask them to bend! Why so? Frustration of their dancing to the diktat of an illiterate minister could not be the most valid reason for this. With due respect to the serious and upright officers, I would prefer to link the mindset of heftier dowry for an IAS officer to this phenomena. We, as a nation, did inherit the colonial institution of corruption!

Corruption, as defined by the World Bank, is the misuse of public property for private gain. It ranges from embezzlement of public money to abuse of power (e.g. asking for bribes).

In recent times though, while Right to Information has brought about a sea change in creating an awareness among the people on government functions, reports and studies still attribute corruption to a lack of transparency in governance rules because procedures are complicated and the bureaucracy enjoys broad discretionary power. It remains a fact that one needs to bribe the officer to get the most simple daily-routine administrative tasks done whether it concerns even getting a complaint lodged about a stolen car!

Former Chief Vigilance Commissioner of India, N Vittal, once stated in an interview to a journalist: “If you ask me who is more corrupt between the politician and the bureaucrat, for statistical reasons, I would say a bureaucrat. A corrupt politician can be thrown out any second. But a bureaucrat stays for 30 years in the government. In terms of the length and the numbers, bureaucratic corruption is more than political corruption.”

However, the fact that black money is a major source of funding for political parties in India frustrates honest and upright enforcers of law and encourage them to blink and toe the lines of their political masters. There is no surprise, therefore, that successive reports by various agencies from time to time have singled out tax evasion to be the major source of corruption. Expectedly therefore, studies have shown that the sectors most affected by corruption include public procurement, tax and customs administration, infrastructure, public utilities, the police and agencies in charge of licenses and permits.

It is interesting to note that levels of corruption in bureaucracy rose after liberalisation in 1991. This contradicts the notion that red tapism during the era of license raj, when the licenses and permits were more important than market forces and the babus wielded enormous powers, was responsible for corrupt practices in the bureaucracy that exploited the system by demanding and accepting bribes for speedy processing of paperwork.

Red tapism has weakened the bureaucracy but it appears that liberalisation without adequate safety nets and enforcement only worsened corruption. In 2012, a Hong Kong based consultancy firm had rated Indian bureaucracy as the worst in Asia.

There are many causes behind the spread of corruption – deterioration of the ethical qualities and moral values of people working as government administrators; comparative low salaries of government officials; complex laws and procedures; poor economic infrastructure and illiteracy that take the general public towards corrupted lifestyle; and the tolerance of people towards corruption.

Yet, corruption banks on lack of integrity – whether financial integrity, intellectual integrity or moral integrity. While training is one way to inculcate values, it is only a long term remedy. But having a more simple and straightforward bureaucracy – which is incredibly easier today with digital technology – could be an effective way to fight corruption.

This requires a political will. Can the present ruling dispensation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, win the fight against corruption? One can only wait and watch!