Mammoth corruption scams in India have caused such a furore that the integrity and honesty of everyone high up in the power hierarchy is in question. But penalising only those at the leadership level is only a tiny part of any process that aims at checking corruption. Even larger, subtler, more pervasive and more devastating to the daily lives of ordinary people is a somehow different form of corruption that takes place systemically with involvement of, rather with the collusion of, people at various levels from high up all the way down to the grassroots level. Ironically, this is rarely taken as corruption with its ordinary meaning, let alone the possibility of any effective drive against such malpractice.
The multi-billion dollar health scam in Uttar Pradesh provides a classical example of this subtler, more institutionalised, less obvious but more pervasive corruption with
multi-level stakeholders. Ironically, it came to notice and was investigated only after the
collateral damage of the continuing theft of state assets had led to two murders of high government officials.
The trail of investigation that led to the exposure of the scam began with the gunning down of chief medical officer (CMO) (Family Welfare), Lucknow, B P Singh on April 2 this year. Before Singh, his predecessor, Vinod Arya, had been gunned down on October 27, 2010, surprisingly, with the same gun. After initial clues behind the motive of the crime, the deputy CMO, Y S Sachan, was arrested and imprisoned, but soon he was apparently
murdered inside the prison.
According to media reports, the opposition parties alleged that Sachan, the alleged mastermind of the double murder, was eliminated by someone higher in the government as he/she feared that Sachan could have revealed the involvement of senior politicians and bureaucrats in the embezzlement of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) funds. They also alleged that this was only the tip of the iceberg as Uttar Pradesh had acquired a staggering `86 billion ($1.7 billion) from Delhi since 2005-2006 for the programme.
Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populated and one of the most backward states. The bulk of its population suffers from easily curable ailments, but the funds to help these people in need of cure have been diverted to the pockets of people from high up in the ministries down to the health workers in the barely functioning rural health facilities. While women kept giving birth to babies at home in extremely unhygienic conditions — contributing to high maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality — data in the health institutions were cooked to siphon off millions through the scheme. Similarly, elderly people with cataract had to pay as much as `15,000 at nursing homes that had received millions from the government to provide free cataract surgery.
This was only one among many such scams, most of which have not been exposed because the circumstances have not led to high-profile murders. That there are such big and pervasive acts of theft and treachery is shocking, but what is more appalling is that the communities, society, the provinces and the Indian state itself have adapted so well to the persistence of such scams. The fact rarely coming to public notice is that a significant proportion of the population is just getting poorer and unhealthier because such scandalous arrangements are in place to divert whatever the state attempts to spend for their welfare.
Even the most conservative statement about the economy of India will be that corruption is not the monopoly of top politicians and bureaucrats, as often portrayed, and those corrupt people may well form the tip of the iceberg. The body of the iceberg has managed to remain underwater, thanks to the rapidly growing economy that has been able to create wealth at a rate somewhat higher than can be stolen at the same time.
But now the economy is showing ominous signs of slowing and with the attention of politicians and policymakers fixed on mega scams like the infamous 2G scam of the distribution of telecom licences and the mammoth scams of
illegal mining, little is being done to fix the
subtle form of corruption.
The long-term costs of such barely visible scams are so profound and accumulating that basic services like health and education for the future generations are in severe jeopardy.
Since the coverage of the bright side of the world’s largest democracy is far more appealing than doing the reverse, the majority of the media in India and outside have chosen to extensively cover the former. The dark side has recently attained a seemingly wide and “bold” coverage, but that too is primarily to increase readership/viewership as sensationalism around the mega scams has proved to be a valuable commodity.
The writer is sociologist and former
professor at IIT Kanpur
