Sugarcane
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Jun 2, 2011
- Messages
- 21,105
- Reaction score
- 29
- Country
- Location
Who is Mahesh Chand Sharma? He is a 52-year-old man from Jaipur, with balding pate and hawk eyes. He started his career as a humble compounder at the tuberculosis clinic of Sawai Man Singh Hospital. In the last nine years, he has swiftly moved up the ladder of success: From storekeeper to nurse to lecturer to observer of the Indian Nursing Council (INC). Along the way, he has amassed wealth that would turn politicians green with envy: Rs.200 crore. He has 10 bank accounts, 30 properties and ownership stake in 25 nursing colleges.
How did he do it? Well, as his colleagues would testify, he is very good at "managing". He 'managed' to win the Florence Nightingale nursing award in 2008, for his "dedication to sufferers", much to the surprise of those who have never seen him in hospital wards. He 'managed' the top bosses of INC so well that he became the 'single-window approver' of government clearance for all nursing colleges in Rajasthan. He has 'managed' healthcare promoters beautifully-withholding paperwork till they greased his palms with the desired sum. And he has 'managed' ministers and bureaucrats so effectively that when the Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau caught him red-handed for pocketing a bribe of Rs.5 lakh on June 30, threatening phone calls started pouring in.
Greasing the right palm
Welcome to the Republic of Bribe, where nothing gets done until the right palm is greased with the right amount. One in two Indians regularly pays bribes when dealing with public institutions, estimates Transparency International's (TI) July 2013 survey, Global Corruption Barometer. "It has turned almost into an art form," says sociologist Dipankar Gupta. Someone pays-to speed up paperwork, avoid trouble with authorities, access basic services-and someone is paid off. The job is done. Everyone smiles. In the TI report, two out of three people believe personal contacts help to get things done in the public sector. More than one in two think governments are run by groups acting in their own interests rather than for the benefit of the citizens. "Bribe thrives when there is a pervasive belief that the powerful are able to get away with it," says Gupta. "People lose trust in institutions and in those entrusted with power."
Big-ticket bribes make big news. And this year, with multi-crore bribery cases blowing up every month, the market price of big-league bribery is out there: July promises to reveal the bribe rate for solar panel rip-offs brewing in Kerala now; in June, CBI revealed Rs.2.25 crore as the going rate for allocating coal blocks; in May, it was Rs.10 crore for cadging a plum post on the Railway Board. Speculation ran rife in May: If retail giant Walmart paid $230 million to get access in a small country like Mexico, what did it pay in India? Three cricketers were arrested in May and Rs.40-Rs.60 lakh seemed to be the pay-off for giving away a pre-fixed number of runs in a given over. In April, Bengal millionaire Sudipta Sen's confessions to CBI exposed Rs.1 crore to be the monthly facilitation fee to politicians, police and tax officials for running a chit fund. In February, it was Rs.362 crore for buying VVIP choppers. In January, Rs.60 crore emerged as the sum a revenue officer could demand to conduct a 'favourable' investigation in the multi-crore Stock Guru swindle.
How much does India pay to navigate through everyday life? I Paid a Bribe, a website run by Bangalore think tank Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, gives some clue unique to that puzzle. An exclusive sharing of data with India Today reveals an invisible economy spanning across the country. It vibrates with thousands of angry complainants forced to pay bribe under duress: "Angry but helpless," "I'm so angry that I paid the bribe." To Swati Ramanathan, co-founder of Janaagraha who runs the website, "With wholesale bribery at the top levels of the nation, we are losing sight of what is right and what is wrong. To me, anyone who is angry enough to report a bribe is an agent of change." Complainants urge each other to shrug off the burden of bribery on the website: "Change will come," "May God save this country."
I Paid A Bribe records a whopping Rs.1,86,57,20,642 shelled out as bribe by 23,091 Indians from 544 cities, over a period of three years (see graphic). That makes Rs.26,932 the average bribe paid by a regular Indian in a year. Of the metros, if Delhi is the hub of big-ticket kickbacks, the culture of steep under-the-table pay-offs pervades civic life the most in Chennai, followed by Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata (see chart). But who do you bribe the most? The biggest slice goes to the police, for passport verification (30 per cent) and traffic violations (25 per cent). Proficient at the art of sponging secret money at the bottom of the pyramid are lower level government officials: 15 per cent of bribes are spent on property registration; 10 per cent on securing a driving licence.
Police bribes make for maximum nuisance, minimum value. "I paid Rs.50 to a police constable. Reason? My car was parked for less than one minute," says a Mumbai complainant. "I know FIR is free but they charged me Rs.200 as nashta-paani," comments another from Amritsar. "I was told that the going bribe rate for passport verification was Rs.500," puts in a Kolkata man. "Does the government pay them a salary or not?" asks an irate Delhi man. "He was worse than a beggar." College students are easy prey. "They force us to withdraw money from the ATM, put us in their suv, scare us in the police station, unless they are satisfied with the money," says Bangalore student Zeeshan Ali, who has had to pay Rs.500 for sitting with a girl, a classmate, in a public place.
Abhinay Joshi, 30, a Bangalore accountant, was driving back home with his wife after dinner at a friend's place in March. Around midnight, he was stopped on Inner Ring Road for a breath test. He was stunned when told that the meter showed high alcohol content. He had conscientiously stayed off alcohol. When he wanted to see the reading, the police curtly refused, confiscated his registration certificate, licence and threatened to issue a notice. It could even mean a jail term for six months. A young plain-clothed officer 'solved' Joshi's problem by asking him, very politely, if he wanted to avoid all the hassle by paying Rs.2,500-without receipt, of course.
In contrast, lower level government officials angle for bigger stakes. In February, Atul Mhatre, a clerk with Mumbai's City and Industrial Development Corporation, was killed by real estate agents for demanding too steep a bribe, Rs.20 lakh, to regularise an unauthorised construction. The same month, the Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta police caught Arjun Singh Lalwani, a grade II clerk with the electricity board, with disproportionate assets worth Rs.40 crore. In June, the Rajasthan Police arrested municipality commissioner Pankaj Prabhakar, along with a grade four employee, for fleecing a man continuously over six months to approve the construction of each floor of his house. Yograj Borkar, 59, of Nagpur had just six months to retire. But the official of the agriculture department walked into a trap set by CBI and was caught early this month while accepting a bribe of Rs.10,000. His forte was withholding certificates for import of agricultural goods.
Chennai, the bribe hotspot
Much of the action in Chennai is in and around the scenic East Coast Road (ECR), with its special economic zones, malls, resorts, art studios, beaches and hotels. It is where the police regularly unleash 'anti-criminal' drives on weekends, rounding up drunken drivers, sellers of pirated movies and general revellers. College student Ravi Kumar complains that this is where he and his girlfriend were stopped one evening. "The policeman threatened to call our parents if we did not pay Rs.20,000." To others like architect R. Seshadri, the rising demand for swanky apartments on ECR, among the executives of multinational companies, has further made it a den of bribery. "To approve a house plan, officials of the Stamps and Registration department regularly demand Rs.35,000-50,000 as bribe," she says.
Read more at: How rampant bribery is corroding India's core : Cover Story - India Today
How did he do it? Well, as his colleagues would testify, he is very good at "managing". He 'managed' to win the Florence Nightingale nursing award in 2008, for his "dedication to sufferers", much to the surprise of those who have never seen him in hospital wards. He 'managed' the top bosses of INC so well that he became the 'single-window approver' of government clearance for all nursing colleges in Rajasthan. He has 'managed' healthcare promoters beautifully-withholding paperwork till they greased his palms with the desired sum. And he has 'managed' ministers and bureaucrats so effectively that when the Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau caught him red-handed for pocketing a bribe of Rs.5 lakh on June 30, threatening phone calls started pouring in.
Greasing the right palm
Big-ticket bribes make big news. And this year, with multi-crore bribery cases blowing up every month, the market price of big-league bribery is out there: July promises to reveal the bribe rate for solar panel rip-offs brewing in Kerala now; in June, CBI revealed Rs.2.25 crore as the going rate for allocating coal blocks; in May, it was Rs.10 crore for cadging a plum post on the Railway Board. Speculation ran rife in May: If retail giant Walmart paid $230 million to get access in a small country like Mexico, what did it pay in India? Three cricketers were arrested in May and Rs.40-Rs.60 lakh seemed to be the pay-off for giving away a pre-fixed number of runs in a given over. In April, Bengal millionaire Sudipta Sen's confessions to CBI exposed Rs.1 crore to be the monthly facilitation fee to politicians, police and tax officials for running a chit fund. In February, it was Rs.362 crore for buying VVIP choppers. In January, Rs.60 crore emerged as the sum a revenue officer could demand to conduct a 'favourable' investigation in the multi-crore Stock Guru swindle.
How much does India pay to navigate through everyday life? I Paid a Bribe, a website run by Bangalore think tank Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, gives some clue unique to that puzzle. An exclusive sharing of data with India Today reveals an invisible economy spanning across the country. It vibrates with thousands of angry complainants forced to pay bribe under duress: "Angry but helpless," "I'm so angry that I paid the bribe." To Swati Ramanathan, co-founder of Janaagraha who runs the website, "With wholesale bribery at the top levels of the nation, we are losing sight of what is right and what is wrong. To me, anyone who is angry enough to report a bribe is an agent of change." Complainants urge each other to shrug off the burden of bribery on the website: "Change will come," "May God save this country."
I Paid A Bribe records a whopping Rs.1,86,57,20,642 shelled out as bribe by 23,091 Indians from 544 cities, over a period of three years (see graphic). That makes Rs.26,932 the average bribe paid by a regular Indian in a year. Of the metros, if Delhi is the hub of big-ticket kickbacks, the culture of steep under-the-table pay-offs pervades civic life the most in Chennai, followed by Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata (see chart). But who do you bribe the most? The biggest slice goes to the police, for passport verification (30 per cent) and traffic violations (25 per cent). Proficient at the art of sponging secret money at the bottom of the pyramid are lower level government officials: 15 per cent of bribes are spent on property registration; 10 per cent on securing a driving licence.
Police bribes make for maximum nuisance, minimum value. "I paid Rs.50 to a police constable. Reason? My car was parked for less than one minute," says a Mumbai complainant. "I know FIR is free but they charged me Rs.200 as nashta-paani," comments another from Amritsar. "I was told that the going bribe rate for passport verification was Rs.500," puts in a Kolkata man. "Does the government pay them a salary or not?" asks an irate Delhi man. "He was worse than a beggar." College students are easy prey. "They force us to withdraw money from the ATM, put us in their suv, scare us in the police station, unless they are satisfied with the money," says Bangalore student Zeeshan Ali, who has had to pay Rs.500 for sitting with a girl, a classmate, in a public place.
Abhinay Joshi, 30, a Bangalore accountant, was driving back home with his wife after dinner at a friend's place in March. Around midnight, he was stopped on Inner Ring Road for a breath test. He was stunned when told that the meter showed high alcohol content. He had conscientiously stayed off alcohol. When he wanted to see the reading, the police curtly refused, confiscated his registration certificate, licence and threatened to issue a notice. It could even mean a jail term for six months. A young plain-clothed officer 'solved' Joshi's problem by asking him, very politely, if he wanted to avoid all the hassle by paying Rs.2,500-without receipt, of course.
In contrast, lower level government officials angle for bigger stakes. In February, Atul Mhatre, a clerk with Mumbai's City and Industrial Development Corporation, was killed by real estate agents for demanding too steep a bribe, Rs.20 lakh, to regularise an unauthorised construction. The same month, the Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta police caught Arjun Singh Lalwani, a grade II clerk with the electricity board, with disproportionate assets worth Rs.40 crore. In June, the Rajasthan Police arrested municipality commissioner Pankaj Prabhakar, along with a grade four employee, for fleecing a man continuously over six months to approve the construction of each floor of his house. Yograj Borkar, 59, of Nagpur had just six months to retire. But the official of the agriculture department walked into a trap set by CBI and was caught early this month while accepting a bribe of Rs.10,000. His forte was withholding certificates for import of agricultural goods.
Chennai, the bribe hotspot
Much of the action in Chennai is in and around the scenic East Coast Road (ECR), with its special economic zones, malls, resorts, art studios, beaches and hotels. It is where the police regularly unleash 'anti-criminal' drives on weekends, rounding up drunken drivers, sellers of pirated movies and general revellers. College student Ravi Kumar complains that this is where he and his girlfriend were stopped one evening. "The policeman threatened to call our parents if we did not pay Rs.20,000." To others like architect R. Seshadri, the rising demand for swanky apartments on ECR, among the executives of multinational companies, has further made it a den of bribery. "To approve a house plan, officials of the Stamps and Registration department regularly demand Rs.35,000-50,000 as bribe," she says.
Read more at: How rampant bribery is corroding India's core : Cover Story - India Today
