Epilogue

It is a high time that a thorough review of institutions created to deal with corruption may be reviewed without fear of political backlash. Many institutions are replicating each others' function.

Lokpal is the latest entrant. Presently it has 11 members. It is functioning out of a five star hotel in Delhi and the rent of that hotel alone is 50 lacs per month. Remuneration and other expenses are not included in this. As per information disclosed in a RTI and published in newspaper, till 30 October 2019 in about seven months of it's functioning it received 1160 complaints out of which 1000 complaints were heard by Lokpal not a single complaint has been lodged or prosecution initiated. Is this satisfactory track record?

In India, as per the Constitution, it is guaranteed that every district shall have a court. However in practice it has been frequently violated and Tribunal after Tribunal have been created in which retired judges have been rehabilitated and which sometime cover entire State. The presiding officers of these Tribunals being re-employed after retirement can not be expected to be as energetic as a young judicial officer. Disposal remains poor with not transparency of performance. Is office of Lokpal undergoing similar inertia?

An integrated approach

The issue of corruption can not be left to senior citizens. The way technology is rapidly changing and the way criminals employ newer technology on daily basis is mind boggling. Investigation into allegations of corruption requires trained young officers with vivid imagination. Retired Judges who have decade of experience may act as advisors but are not fit to be investigators.

Multiple institutions acting in silos create another problem. Institutions through its officers gain experience which is passed down to successor generations in future and is consideredby policy makers alike. But when institution functions in silos, this flow of information is interrupted.

Take for example a case where CBI unearths a novel way of transfer of money by an accused in one case. If it is reported to CVC, it can make a vigilance guide lines for all public servants to prevent it in future. But Lokpal is not required to and does not report to CVC. In such case any administrative experience of Lokpal would remain it'sown unless it volunteer to share it with another institution. In that case it will be sharing this information with multiple agencies.

Central Vigilance Commission is another dis-functional white elephant which must be shut down. It is filled with bureaucrats and is sustained by bureaucrats who have hard wired concurrence of CVC in various rules for appointments and disciplinary actions.CVC is clueless about corruption and how it is happening.

In 2015 my Banker invited me to accompany him to a conference called 'Vigilance Meet'. The Meet was conducted by an Additional Vigilance Commissioner and Branch managers of the that Public Sector Bank (means Government owned) had to attend with one of their customer. We were all supposed to interact and give feed back. The Vigilance Commissioner gave a short speech and then invited questions. My friend said that it is just a formality and we should not get involved. But then Mr. Vigilance made a remark which forced me to switch on the microphone and speak. It also revealed that he had no clue what was going on in Banks. In the previous Chapter I had mentioned about the problem of Regulators and in particular The Governor of Reserve Bank of India. If Reserve Bank of one regulator, the CVC was another regulator of Government Banks, which doled out huge sums of loans without adequate collateral. In case of big rather huge amounts of loans it was happening on phone calls from influential voices in Government. But there was another game going on at lower level.

Banks give loans on mortgage of fixed assets which will act as collateral. The legal documents of title are sent to a lawyer who has to vet it before it can be accepted. The Vigilance Commissioner asked Bank managers if they were ensuring that the customers were not permitted to meet the Bank Lawyers? Coming from him it implied that lawyers are corrupt and this move will avoid corruption. I intervened and protested and he retracted that he did not meant this. But he was clueless.

It is common knowledge that people who need bank loan, have to deal though a middle man who gets the papers fixed. Often the charges of middle man includes a cut for the Bank Officer. Vigilance is clueless about it.

Another problem in Bank'sloan default is that another bank hired lawyers who were relatives of Bank Officers. Inexperienced Lawyers vetted properties without any due diligence. Another problem is in the office of Registrar of Properties. But the CVC is clueless about all these problems.

The Vigilance can not work if people who spent their entire career inside Ivory Tower of Government citadel. The people of trade and commerce can tell where corruption is happening. Only on knowing the cause of corruption, can it be handled. Otherwise one would end up fighting air-mills like Joan Quixote.

Merger over due

The right thing to do would be to merge all these institution and create something like a pan India multi-layered Revenue Intelligence Department which may have in-house taxpayers' data analysis as well.

However almost all existing revenueofficers also look after the adjudication of revenue claims of the state. This job will have to be realigned to a different Tribunal. This will also infuse transparency in these revenue claims which at present are highly opaque and a breeding ground for corruption.

Bullion or Gold has a special attraction in India. Until about three decades possession of bullion was illegal except under a licence issued to manufacturers. That law called Gold Control Act, 1968 was repealed in 1990 but the hangover of the authorities continue. Customs Act frequently seize Gold of Foreign Markings and demand production of a bill to show that it was purchased from a legal source. In several cases, the purchaser produces a bill and a deal is made. If not, the vendor is called to show as form where and when he purchased the stock.In several cases it so happened that Custom Official let go the person from whom the Gold was recovered and imposed duty on the so called vendor as he had not purchased that brand of bill. The bill had no description or brand of bullion mentioned on it and vendee had misused it to get away.

There are many departments like Customs Department andRevenue Intelligence Department to deal with the same problem of evasion of custom duty. Yet it has miserably failed to notice the massive evasion of duty on consumer goods sold online and despatched to India as sample or gift.

An App

We never had the technology which we have today and that too at the rates which are cheapest in the world. Let us put internet to good use by opening up hearings before Regulators and Adjudicators and keep citizens better informed about these proceedings.

Why we do not have an app based, bribe or other activities reporting system? Such app can have a GPS enabled location system, an encrypted video/audio recording which can be uploaded to secured server of relevant authority. There is still so much which can be caught on camera. If there is a fear of flooding with complaints, add fixed categories of complaints can be made mandatory before upload. Check every single categorised complaints and check 'any other' category randomly. The fear of existence of such an app is more effective even with a few caught culprits.

There are billions of websites on the internet and all websites have one common feature. It is called address of it's webmaster. Guess on which websites you can not find it?

May be you guessed it. Most of Government of India web sites do not have it. Why? Answer is simple. Why bother. Nobody is answerable to nobody. For example see this website which allots ISBN number for free: see http://isbn.gov.in

The feature is provided to point out any non functional feature in the web site. The reason is obvious. Why bother? They know that it will not work most of the time but people of India are persistent and they some how manage with by opening in different browser including windows for which it was originally created.

The Income Tax is another such site. For decades they used proprietary Microsoft Excel format for filing of Annual Tax Return. A few years back they started providing Java version. But that also did not work. Unfortunately the Java version was also not open source version but of proprietarysoftware of Oracle. I asked this question under RTI:

"Who is officer responsible for checking the functioning of ITR 3 Java Version? Please provide his name, address and phone number? If an entire team is responsible, please provide the details of team leader."

This was the reply given by Income Tax Officer & CPIO, CPC, Banglore (vide RTI/July/3/2017-18 dated 02 August 2017):

"There is a specific person assigned for checking each type of return utility. There are various levels of check carried out by group of people. The ultimate ownership is with Income Tax Department."

Look at creativeness. How it refused to give the name of person responsible for the lapse. However this time I did get a phone call from some officer who advised me to borrow a Microsoft Window computer and use it to file the tax return. The person responsible for performance apparently does not exist or was so incompetent that he could not help.

Accountability

There is neither any law nor practice to ensure accountability in any 'Public Servant' who for all practical purposes are public masters. There is no mechanism for grievance redressal in the Government.

It is impossible to imagine life without computers and internet. How this happened? It was the Bug Reporting system adopted by various software developers which enabled them to launch new updates and solve problems. There are dozens of Bug reporting software which are available for free. Can't we have a bug reporting software for Governments and it's officials? It can be made non-binding by law but it will introduce transparency. It will at least reveal the bottle necks in the system. It may be used to troll honest officials or normal procedure but that is where moderators come it. But under no circumstances moderators should be a Government Servant. We can see what they are doing in existing grievance portals. They simply squash the complaints without a response.

India rather many parts were under occupation of foreigners for last several hundred years. The ruler cared nothing for subjects. After 1947 it was supposed to change. Subjects were to be elevated into citizens. But that did not happen. Colony of British became colony of Bureaucrats.

Every vendor in online marketing age has a feature to rate the service. Why every department or officer of Government should not be rated? It can be piloted on some consumer services like railway, to start with. Ask passengers to rate the experience. If this is done it may infuse some accountability. Presently there is none.

A republic is not created by naming it as such, if it remains a colony of it's unaccountable bureaucrats. In such situation corruption becomes first tool of survival but it is not the last.The last causality is republic itself.

Yemen was one such republic. Let's learn from others.