Corruption and Bribery: The Kaushik View
TWO years ago Dr. Kaushik Basu wrote a paper suggesting a way to cut down corruption. This is of course a large problem and, while we must work against the whole gamut of it, waiting to solve the whole problem must not become an alibi for doing nothing . It was with this in mind that he proposed one way of reducing one class of bribery: “harassment bribes”, defined as bribes that ordinary people often have to pay to get what is rightfully theirs, such as when a person's income tax refund or driving license is held back, with all formalities completed, till he/she agrees to grease palms.
Basu says,
Such bribes are just a segment of the large problem of corruption, but they are by no means negligible. For ordinary citizens, these are often the most ubiquitous forms of harassment at the hands of officialdom. My suggestion was that, for such crimes, we must not treat the ordinary citizen, who is the victim of this practice, on par with the official who takes the bribe, as our current law does. In particular, we should not punish the bribe giver but should instead make the penalty stiffer for the bribe taker and also require him to return the bribe. My belief is that if we make this kind of an amendment to India's Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, there will be a sharp decrease in bribery. This is because it will now be in the interest of the bribe giver to get the official who took the bribe caught. Knowing this, there will be much greater reluctance on the part of officials to take bribes.
Soon after the British in India declared sati a crime, they went on to declare witnessing sati also a crime. Is there any surprise that the courts seldom found any witnesses for sati?
One reason I refuse to partake in the debate about whether corruption enhances or thwarts growth is my view that corruption should be considered unacceptable in a civilized society no matter what it does to growth. In my life as an economic adviser, nothing distresses me more than the news breaks on corruption that we get ever so often. Our citizens deserve better.
Human ingenuity is so great that no matter how many plugs we put in to stop corruption, people will almost invariably find a way around it.
"Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money" - Kautilya‘s Arthashastra