RAICHUR: ‘Nanage yaaru lancha koda bekagilla’, ‘Naanu brashta adhikari nagalare’. This proclamation in Kannada means ‘No bribe, please’; ‘I don’t want to be known as a corrupt officer’.
As you enter the chamber of 68-year-old office superintendent at Raichur Institute of Medical Sciences, you are greeted by a board on his table with these words.
And the board is sending the message loud and clear and is proving more effective than perhaps any anti-corruption campaign could have achieved.
For, in the last couple of years since he put up this board, no one has approached him offering bribe. On the other hand, it has earned him great respect.
The superintendent, Karyappa Kallur, a retired Tahsildar of Devadurga, who is now working at RIMS and has his office on the first floor, said he had joined the institute after his retirement nearly seven years ago.
Inspired by an IAS officer from Andhra Pradesh who had put up a similar board in his office, Kallur decided to put up such an ‘advisory board’.
“I have not done this to gain fame. I want to tell people that I am not here for sale or to bribe. We will complete their work as per the rules,” he said.
“After putting up this board on my table, no one tried to pay me under the table,” he said.
It is not after retirement that he started his crusade against corruption. “In my forty years of government service, many people have approached me during working and after office hours to bribe me but I warned them. It is people who make the officers corrupt in order to get their files cleared at the earliest. I started my government service as a village accountant in 1972 and retired as Tahsildar in 2011,” he said.
“I urge all government employees, including officers, to put up similar boards on their table so that people will stop offering money to get their works completed out of turn. If possible, the government should make such boards mandatory. It is my small contribution towards making a corruption-free society,” said Kallur.
A former judge seems to be impressed by this ‘board room’. Sangappa Mitalkod, a former principal judge at Raichur District Session Court, said, “I have given hundreds of judgments in my career against corruption. The photo of the office superintendent’s chamber where he has put up a board against corruption impressed me. This should be followed in all offices.”