How to deal with Corruption
Published by Ravikiran Rao March 9th, 2004 in GovernanceOk people, I have some posts pending. I want to make a post actually defending Nehru and another post attacking Nehru. I am also not going to shy away from the challenge thrown at me by a couple of commenters, asking me What Would I Do In 1947.
This is in addition to the next post in the economics series that I know is long overdue. But right now apart from my day job I am also engaged in the task of building a freer India.
Here is a quickie post by my standards. I have thought of what the correct hierarchy of approaches should be to deal with corruption. Without much explanation, and subject to change, here it is.
Eliminate the department, law or regulation.
Privatize the function.
Move the function to the lowest level of governance possible, i.e. if it can be done at the panchayat level, don’t make it the state government’s responsibility
Simplify the law
Implement checks and balances.
Legalise the corruption.
Inform people of the law.
Punish transgressions.
Live with it.
The list is meant to be hierarchical, i.e. we should try approach 1 before we get on to approach 2 and so on. For example, implementing checks and balances before you simplify the law will lead to a Byzantine bureaucracy. More than one approach might have to be used (i.e. you should simplify the law and inform people of the law) but sometimes one approach precludes the others. (If you eliminate the function, there is no need for any further step)
I’ll think more and explain more in a later post. I might also change the order.
Yes I know exactly what I mean when I say “Legalise the corruption”, but feel free to scream at me in the interim.
actually- i agree with you on this one- legalize corruption. human nature is such the minute you can have it you dont want it - and vice versa. however human nature is also to ignore simple solutions and take complicated paths- but then that would be another post - right?
Nice list. Legalizing corruption. But will that mean if I am not corrupt, I would be penalised? or jailed even?
And if corruption were legalized, would you have a law that says how much of corruption is withing the limit. Would there be a corruption speed lane and a corruption slwer lane, like on motorways?
And wouldnt you have to spend money in enforcing the law, thereby leading to heavier taxes and heavier bills and expenditure of the government.
On another level, what if the people who are not corrupt now, wouldnt they be corrupt once the law is enacted. After all, they are doing something that the law doesnt allow. They are not corrupt, while the law says corruption is ok. Isn’t it a paradox?
Am I confused?
(But I do agree that legalizing will remove it more or less)
legalising corruption is going to put a lot of strain on the moral fibre of the society. such a step warrants a minimum level of maturity, both moral as well as financial from the individual. i think that even today, the average man on the street has not achieved that level.
In India at least, privatization does not seem to be a good solution in most cases. Or probably it’s the way privatization is done here.Yeah, we do see a beautiful face to welcome us , instead of a “babu” , but the quality of service and other improvements which we expect from such private organizations are nowhere.And in many cases it becomes a monopoly of a single compnay instead of monopoly of state,for e.g., “Akash” channel in Chhatisgarh(it’s closed now after BJP came into power).Agreed,these companies don’t take bribes from people normally, but they use other methods to have consumer’s money.And who knows if they have the authority, they won’t misuse it.