HEALTHY AND UNHEALTHY CORRUPTION

A huge population making resources seemingly scarce, little time and lot of things to be done, economic inequality, affluent people with more ideas and money than time willing to take as well as pay bribes, more loopholes in laws than sections. With all these it is just impossible to eradicate corruption in our country.

Even the most uncorrupt among us does indulge in some corruption at some point of time due to one of the compulsions mentioned above. Believe me corruption is not just exchange of money. Even getting a Railway ticket in Emergency Quota or a Special darshan in Tirupathi without standing in the queue, to name a few, is as much corruption as anything else.

It is here that I wish to divide corruption into healthy and unhealthy corruption. Believe me you may at times find these corrupt people perform much better and productively than uncorrupt ones. And whereas I would recommend immediate eradication of unhealthy corruption, the healthy corruption, if not eradicated, must be properly regulated to put our country in a healthy growth mode.

An unhealthy corruption can be defined, at macro level, where the country is cheated or sold out cheaply for individual benefits and at micro level, where legitimate rights and necessities of citizens is robbed off for the benefit of certain individuals resulting in the civilization and development of our country taking a back seat.

Healthy corruption is one, if legitimized and regulated can lead to the Departments functioning more efficiently and support massively to the cause of fast track growth.

Recently I spoke to a high official of a private sector bank enquiring about the difference between the various categories of Credit Cards apart from their colour and fees. He told me that when it comes to the services available most of the categories are entitled to the same set of services, but what differentiates them is the promptness of the services. The person holding the premium card paying maximum fees gets his problem solved almost at home or immediately whereas the economy class cards would get the same complaint attended to in a week. So the extra fees are in a way bribe for prompt service but legitimized as fees for premium card.

Why not apply the same logic on all services where the officials can offer premium service or economy service depending on the pre-determined fees. The premium on the fees should go to the official. Its like a tatkal scheme on every service. This way I am sure you would find the officials on their toes always and working as efficiently as anybody.

Yes, there is a possibility that the people affording economy fees may not be able to get their work done at all on account of more people willing to pay premium. But that can be tackled by fixing targets to officials that for every premium service rendered a certain number of economy cases should be catered to and evaluation can be done by verifying the pending economy service applications at the month end.

This way the officials are happy with their earning commensurate to the efforts, the premium customers who are responsible of putting the country into fast track of growth receive the push and the layman or economy customers also gets his grievance attended to by virtue of target scheme.

Heart in Heart I would love to have a corruption free India, but till then we need a realistic approach to the problem and it is a choice between bad and worst.