Berlin-based Transparency International, the watchdog body that annually keeps a tab on corruption, has recently ranked India 72nd among 180 nations in its Corruption Perception Index of 2007.

The composite index defines corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain and measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among a country’s public officials and politicians. Drawing on as many as 12 polls and surveys from nine independent institutions, the index gathers the opinions of business people and country analysts.

That India routinely appears as one of the most corrupt nations of the world must come as no shocker. But the rub lies in India’s claims to the global sweepstakes of a great power. With a corruption level that is as highly alarming as in India, its growth is being seriously atrophied.

A part of life

Corruption is so much part of our body politic in India that almost all of us pander to some white-collar corruption. It can be bribing a telephone lineman, or a LPG dealer upon procurement of a new connection, or a traffic constable. It has struck deep roots with our executive, judiciary and legislature.

Corruption in India has a unique institutional character. Without corruption being there, the tom-tommed sting operations would have drawn a blank because the primary reason for such operations to become successful is entrapment that feeds on the human tendency to greed.

The idea of ombudsmanship is rather new. Think how during the 80’s and 90’s, corruption became associated with the occupants of the highest echelons of India’s political system. Rajiv Gandhi’s government was rocked by scandals, as was the government of P V Narasimha Rao.

Politicians have come so closely to be identified with corruption that public opinion veers round to the view that politicians and ministers are downright corrupt and that corruption is on the rise.

But history does have looming instances to show how corruption and nepotism undid the Roman Empire, gave a lie to the idylls of the French Revolution and the October Revolution in Russia and how they led to the fall of the Chiang Kai-Shek Government on the mainland of China. The collapse of the mighty Soviet Union was a lot due to a culture of graft, internal corruption and chronic inefficiency.

The World Bank defined corruption as the “use of public office for private profit.” As one observer noted with a wry sense of humour, in India one gets the “neta”, the corrupt politician; the “babu”, the corrupt bureaucrat; the “lala”, the corrupting businessman; the “jhola”, the corrupt NGO; and the “dada”, the criminal of the underworld. No need can be more pressing than the task of cleaning the Augean stables.

For all of our welfarist pretensions, chew on this one. Out of a population of greater than one billion in India, 26 per cent live below the poverty line. Any welfare policies addressing the needs of the poor are greatly inhibited by the corruption that seeps into the bureaucratic apparatus.

Take a rather dated estimate by a Central Vigilance Commission analyst in 2001. Out of the Rs 150 million ($3.75 million) spent in the public distribution system (PDS) to provide food to the poor, 31 per cent of the grains and 36 per cent of the sugar were leaked into the black market.

This meant that nearly Rs 50 million ($1 million) worth of subsidies were not reaching their intended beneficiaries; in a sense, depriving them of the food that was very much their entitlement.

There is a way

In 1974 Hong Kong tackled the problem of corruption by setting up an Independent Commission. Lee Kwan Yew worked hard to make Singapore one of the cleanest governments in the world.  Surely, where there is a will there is a way.

Disgusted with wholesale corruption in Congress ministries formed under the 1935 Act in six states in the year 1937, Mahatma Gandhi in May 1939 wrote angrily: “I would go to the length of giving the whole Congress a decent burial, rather than put up with the corruption that is rampant.”  But there has to be a will and a determination first. Our war against corruption should no less potentially be waged than our war against terror.