Taking on corruption

Punjab’s new Chief Minister is determined to meet the menace of corruption head-on. It was the first promise he made to the people after assuming office. It is not going to be easy. But if he means it and takes the campaign seriously, he and the AAP are bound to make a difference that will endear the populace to this new party.

If Mann gets rid of every culprit, he may be left with very few to carry on his administration. Better to target the notorious ones and deprive them of their ill-gotten gains.

Corruption and communalism are the two great evils that keep our great country backward. The BJP avers that it has tackled the menace of corruption successfully. Is it living in a dream world or does it think that the people can be taken for a ride by its propaganda machine?

Since Modi took over the reins of office in Delhi, it is true that high-ticket corruption has not been reported, as it had been during the Congress rule. All parties need money to fight elections and keep their cadres intact. The BJP has managed its coffers in a novel manner. It has invented the electoral bond which has been structured to hide the identity of those corporates who patronise these bonds. Naturally a quid pro quo would have been woven into such transactions but the top leaders and ministers would be forced to keep any itching fingers firmly to themselves.

What hurts the common man is the daily corruption that she or he experiences at the hands of the ubiquitous low-level government ‘servant’. It is not only traffic cops and police officers in thanas who extract their pound of flesh, but also small functionaries in every sarkari department who make the life of the ordinary citizen unbearable.

In the city of my birth, Mumbai, low-level every-day corruption is endemic. The two government organisations which deal with the citizens every day are the Mumbai Municipal Corporation and the police. Other departments like the Slum Rehabilitation Authority and MHADA, the sales tax department, and even the departments of government that deal with social service to the partially enabled, like the blind, are engrossed, not in the work they are entrusted with and the service they are supposed to render, but in finding ways to get rich at any cost!

An NGO I am involved in is the Public Concern for Governance Trust (PCGT), set up 20 years ago to combat corruption in Mumbai. At first, PCGT entertained individual complaints. We wrote stern letters to the small functionaries holding up sanctions of benefits enjoined by law. A copy of such letters were sent to the senior-most official in the organisation, and also to the Director, Anti-Corruption Bureau. It worked. The victim received what she or he was entitled to.

We took a policy decision to discontinue this service when we found that the number of requests was greater than our meagre staff could cope with, and also because we felt that we could invite unmerited, even adverse, attention from quarters that were interested in status quo.

Not that we accepted the injustice. We decided to use the RTI in a major way to force the pace. DS Ranga Rao, an officer of the Intelligence Bureau, joined PCGT the day he retired as Assistant Director from the IB’s Mumbai office. He took charge of our RTI project with such dedication that we were emboldened to start a month-long internship programme for students, mainly from law colleges, to acquaint them with this potentially effective instrument to fight corruption and train them in the practical use of the Act to help people in distress.

I would like to mention one case that Rao pursued over two years, before an old impoverished woman got her dues. A ‘chawl’, which she and her family was occupying, was demolished by MHADA in the mid-70s after allotting temporary ‘accommodation’ to them. In 2016, she was forced to pay Rs 57,000 for her new tenement, whereas she was not supposed to pay even a single rupee, and instead, she was entitled to get her newly reconstructed tenement free of cost, as per MHADA rules.

She made the necessary payment and got a receipt. After that, MHADA officials created a false document to the effect that she was in the occupation of a second transit accommodation and unless she would vacate it and hand it over back to MHADA, she would not be allowed to take the new tenement. But when she went to take possession of the so-called second ‘temporary’ accommodation, she found that it was already occupied by others, allegedly with the knowledge of officials.

MHADA functionaries at the lower level refused to budge. Senior officers were approached. Even IAS and IPS officers heading the organisation as CEO and Chief Vigilance and Security Officer did not provide any relief to her. RTI queries were systematically avoided by shifting responsibility to various departments within the organisation. Finally in desperation, with inputs garnered from our RTI processes, we served MHADA a lawyer’s notice drafted and signed by PCGT’s trustee, Abha Singh, a former Indian Postal Service Officer and wife of a former IPS officer, YP Singh.

This worked. After eight years, Parvati Shinde got possession of what was legally due to her. The sheer tenacity to a worthy cause of Ranga Rao succeeded.

Bhagwant Mann, AAP’s duly elected Chief Minister of Punjab, will have to struggle to weed out this deeply-embedded disease of corruption at the cutting-edge of the administration. He will require the tenacity and single-mindedness of a Ranga Rao to achieve even a semblance of success. If he gets rid of every culprit, it is likely that he will be left with very few to carry on his administration. Better if he gets rid of the really notorious ones and deprives them first of all their ill-gotten gains.

I wish him luck in his endeavour. I shall watch his progress in this mission with much interest.