Enough of Bribe Demanding 3 Myths about Bribe-Demanding: Myth 1: Bribe Demanding is a cultural issue for Indians. The Reality: Bribe Demanding is not a cultural issue. A recent ‘Honesty experiment’ by Readers Digest magazine had 12 wallets with approximately Rs. 3000/- left about in different cities around the world. In Helsinki in Finland 11 out of these 12 wallets were returned, Mumbai came in second with 9 out of 12 being returned; ahead of New York, Moscow, Amsterdam and Berlin. So this ‘cultural dishonesty’ argument holds no water, is made without an understanding of the great Indian heritage and is downright insulting. Yet, the world over, people describe India as a place where bribes will be demanded, and will be and have to be paid to get work done! Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index of 2012 lists India at 94 out of __ countries. Thankfully there are countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc in the world – so we are not towards the last! Countries like Brazil, China, South Africa, and Namibia have overtaken us in getting their corruption perceptions improved. Myth 2: What’s the harm – atleast the work gets done.It happens all over the world. Reality: Corruption has led to a web of uncertainty in doing business, increasing costs, distortion of systems as ‘access’ to decision makers becomes important, deliberately bad decisions being made – not in India’s interests, but only for private interests, an embarrassment on the world stage as we saw in the Commonwealth games scam, loot of our natural resources through abuse of discretion and secret allotment procedures, as we saw in the Adarsh scam, coal-gate, spectrum scam. Worse, this leads to crony capitalism growing, where only a small group of businessmen control the policy makers, thus making it difficult to do business for the other businessmen. This corruption eats into our democratic systems as money-laundering, excessive control of the election systems...
Posted on: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 18:04:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015