According to a Transparency International list of 159 countries in order of increasing corruption, India ranks 92nd. On a 1-10 scale, with 1 being 'most corrupt' and 10 being 'least corrupt', India got a score of 2.9. (Iceland, with a score of 9.7, was the least corrupt nation while the US, at 7.6, came in 17th place.)
But what does that mean? Today, I decided to ask people I know about their daily experiences with corruption/baksheesh, etc.
Me: Surely this country can't be as corrupt as everyone thinks it is? (Says the person who has never directly paid a bribe)
Him: I remember when I was trying to get my son into school in Calcutta. Things were bad. All the other boys in his class had gotten in somewhere, and my son had been in kindergarten for four years. My wife started to tell me: "what sort of person are you, not getting your son into school?" (Pauses to let the impact of this sink in)
Me: Right.
Him: We went to this school, it's one of the best boys schools in the city. The day of the interview, my son caught a cold and refused to talk. The school disqualified him.
Me: I guess that makes sense.
Him: But then they told me that they would reconsider him - if we paid 5 Lakhs.
Me: You had to pay a bribe to get your son into school?
Him: Well, we couldn't afford it, so no. Then we went to the second-best school, but we couldn't afford the bribe there either. And so on. I was going from school to school. I was standing in the street writing letters asking them to consider my son. The principals would throw me out without a hearing.
Me: So then what?
Him: My wife wouldn't believe me so one day I took her along. They threw her out too.
Me: So what kind of students were being accepted?
Him: All the sons of rich Marwari businessmen. Stinking rich, mainly.
Me: Do the schools care if the son is an idiot?
Him: Not really.
Me: Did you have the same problem with your daughter?
Him: Oh, that was much easier. Marwaris don't want their girls to be too educated, and don't really care whether their girls go to a brand-name school. (I can verify that this last bit is kinda true) So the bribes for girls' schools are much lower.
Another friend, another story...
Him: So one day I was driving back from a party. A cop pulled me over and asked if I'd been drinking. I said I'd had a single beer a few hours ago. I was a hotshot young journalist in those days so I tried to explain that my blood alcohol level was well below the level limit. He had no idea what that meant.
Me: Hm.
Him: Anyway, he said "You've been drinking? Get out of the car." So I got out of the car. He had me wait. Ten minutes later, he came back with a piece of paper. The paper contained the results of a blood test.
Me: Your blood test?
Him: No, they never took my blood.
Me: So why did they give you someone else's blood test?
Him: Well, a doctor had signed it, and the cop said that those were the results of my blood test, and it proved that I'd been driving drunk.
Me: But you never had a blood test. And you weren't driving drunk.
Him: No. So anyway, on the basis of the blood test they impounded my motorcycle. Every day I was going to the station to try to get my bike back. Meanwhile, every day my boss was calling me up and asking me why I wasn't working.
Me: You can't call in "corrupt"?
Him: In those days, "my bike was impounded by the cops" was code for "I'm in a bar having a drink," or it might as well have been. I was concerned I was going to lose my job. So I went to the police station. I told them it wasn't my blood test, and they said that I'd have to prove that in court. Which could take 10 years.
Me: Did they give your bike back?
Him: No. So I had no transport. So then I decided to plead guilty, to save time. I went in front of the judge and she looked at the paper and she looked at me. And she, of course, had seen a million cases like this before. So she said to the cop next to me, "I'm going to reduce his fine." And the cop didn't say anything.
Me: Did he want a bribe?
Him: No! It turns out that a few weeks earlier his boss had told him that they needed to make 500 arrests for drunk driving in the next month, since they were running some sort of police marketing campaign.
Friend, overhearing this: You're lucky you didn't have to pay the judge!
Him: Yeah, she was one of the good ones.
Another story...
Him: So my aunt had just died and I was transporting a bunch of her old books, papers, etc in my car. Emptying out her house.
Me: Sad.
Him: Anyway, I didn't realize this but as I was driving away from my aunt's house a police inspector started to follow me. Eventually he stopped me. He asked what was in the car and I explained, and he said it looked like I was transporting commercial goods in a personal vehicle. He wrote me a fine for Rs. 3000.
Me: What?
Him: So I went to the police station and told the inspector. I said that my car was full of old and worthless stuff. No one in their right mind would believe those were commercial goods. And the inspector said, "Well, the cop will just say that you changed the stuff in your car."
Me: What?
Him: But the inspector was a pretty decent type - he reduced the offense to a traffic violation.
Me: But you didn't violate any traffic laws.
Him: No. See, the nice thing about paying a bribe in Delhi is that at least if you pay a bribe your work gets done. In Calcutta, you pay a bribe, still nothing happens. So here you have some professionalism in bribe-taking.
Me: Doesn't seem like much to hang onto.
Him: This isn't like America, where you have an accident, you call 911 and someone comes. If I started to have a heart attack now, you wouldn't call 100. You would start to pray. That's why Indians still believe in God, because we don't have 911.
What I'm beginning to realize is that asking the average Indian how corruption impacts his life is like opening a tiny hole in a very large, very plugged tap. It unleashes this massive geyser. Look at the site I Paid A Bribe, which features stories even more absurd than these and also city-by-city bribe stats.
The biggest complaint people seem to have against the bribe ecosystem is that it's inefficient and arbitrary. The lofty Ivory Tower argument that corruption, in some cases, can ensure access to goods for people who can't otherwise afford them, or grease the machinery of an under-funded state, or whatever, don't really seem to play out on the ground. After all, it's not as if there's some central "bribe oversight authority" that ensures work gets done, even after significant bribes have been paid.
Bribery is in fact so lucrative - and so black market - that an entire infrastructure of "agents" has sprung up whose sole job is to navigate the tortured lanes of Indian bureaucracy, greasing the right palms along the way, obtaining things like drivers' licenses, passports and marriage certificates. Consider that driving ability and the speedy acquisition of a drivers license in Delhi are only marginally correlated, if at all, as studies have shown. In fact, that linked study suggests the opposite: the drivers who were willing to pay were more likely to get a license than drivers who actually knew how to drive. When you consider the high number of traffic fatalities and accidents in Delhi, the daily consequences become obvious.
The prominent Indian economist Kaushik Basu, in a working paper, suggests a dramatic new solution to this problem: decriminalize bribe-giving, but not bribe-taking. (To be clear: Basu separates bribes into several categories and his suggestion only applies to bribes given by people to obtain things that should be theirs by law, like a passport or a drivers license or a marriage license.) Other countries have achieved some limited success by decriminilizing one side of a market while increasing the liability of the other, so Basu's theory is not without its precedents.
Here's his argument in a nutshell: "Every time a person gives a bribe...it will be in the interest of the bribe giver to expose this act of corruption (not only will she not be punished but she will be getting back the money that she gave as a bribe). [So] the bribe taker will not want to take the bribe."
I anticipate a few hurdles, though (or, in more logical parlance, problematic assumptions).
The first is: where the heck will the bribe-giver to go expose the crime? There is no government or corporate institution in modern India that is reliably bribe-free. In other words, people who expose corruption will probably suffer even further at the hands of the authorities to whom they complain. This important consideration merits only an inconclusive footnote in Basu's paper: "we ignore here the fact that in a society with widespread corruption there is the problem of 'bribe hierarchy', that is, the possibility that even after one gets caught taking a bribe one may be able to escape by bribing the very person or agency that caught you taking a bribe...In a fuller analysis of policy change it is critical to pay attention to these towers of bribery and how we can strategize to break them down."
Secondly, there's no guarantee that bribe givers will want to report bribery, even to recover their bribe amount, IF paying a bribe means getting speedy access to services. Let's say that it takes 9 months to get a drivers license without a bribe (which is often the case) and 15 days to get a license with a bribe (also often the case). Would the bribe giver rather pay his Rs. 1000 and go to the front of the line, if the alternative is a massively time-consuming and inconvenient process? In rare cases, bribery does ensure more efficient delivery - but only for those who are willing and able to pay bribes. Also, exposing one cop/official as a bribe taker effectively means that the option of paying a bribe to ensure delivery is forever closed to you, since A) that guy gets fired and B) word gets around. Are people willing to give up the option of resorting to bribery? Basu overestimates the amount of faith that Indians have in the state, as well as their fondness for cutting to the front of the queue by whatever means available.
Finally, there's the most obvious problem: how does someone even prove that bribery took place? Is the burden of proof on the accused or the accuser? Indian newspapers are full of dramatic stories of government raids on officials who turn out to have millions of rupees worth of gold bars stashed in their mattresses. But the average corrupt official is a middle class man whose job pays him less than he needs. The cash he earns through bribes immediately goes towards petrol, alcohol or bribes to officials higher up the bribe chain (he too needs to send his son to the best school in Calcutta!) As one police officer very memorably told my friend while explaining why it would be impossible to catch the men who stole a wad of cash from her purse:
"The only thing they stole was cash. Cash is a difficult thing to trace. Let's say you have some cash in your pocket. Tomorrow I take that cash and put it in my pocket. What will you do if I say that cash was mine to begin with?"
But what does that mean? Today, I decided to ask people I know about their daily experiences with corruption/baksheesh, etc.
Me: Surely this country can't be as corrupt as everyone thinks it is? (Says the person who has never directly paid a bribe)
Him: I remember when I was trying to get my son into school in Calcutta. Things were bad. All the other boys in his class had gotten in somewhere, and my son had been in kindergarten for four years. My wife started to tell me: "what sort of person are you, not getting your son into school?" (Pauses to let the impact of this sink in)
Me: Right.
Him: We went to this school, it's one of the best boys schools in the city. The day of the interview, my son caught a cold and refused to talk. The school disqualified him.
Me: I guess that makes sense.
Him: But then they told me that they would reconsider him - if we paid 5 Lakhs.
Me: You had to pay a bribe to get your son into school?
Him: Well, we couldn't afford it, so no. Then we went to the second-best school, but we couldn't afford the bribe there either. And so on. I was going from school to school. I was standing in the street writing letters asking them to consider my son. The principals would throw me out without a hearing.
Me: So then what?
Him: My wife wouldn't believe me so one day I took her along. They threw her out too.
Me: So what kind of students were being accepted?
Him: All the sons of rich Marwari businessmen. Stinking rich, mainly.
Me: Do the schools care if the son is an idiot?
Him: Not really.
Me: Did you have the same problem with your daughter?
Him: Oh, that was much easier. Marwaris don't want their girls to be too educated, and don't really care whether their girls go to a brand-name school. (I can verify that this last bit is kinda true) So the bribes for girls' schools are much lower.
Another friend, another story...
Him: So one day I was driving back from a party. A cop pulled me over and asked if I'd been drinking. I said I'd had a single beer a few hours ago. I was a hotshot young journalist in those days so I tried to explain that my blood alcohol level was well below the level limit. He had no idea what that meant.
Me: Hm.
Him: Anyway, he said "You've been drinking? Get out of the car." So I got out of the car. He had me wait. Ten minutes later, he came back with a piece of paper. The paper contained the results of a blood test.
Me: Your blood test?
Him: No, they never took my blood.
Me: So why did they give you someone else's blood test?
Him: Well, a doctor had signed it, and the cop said that those were the results of my blood test, and it proved that I'd been driving drunk.
Me: But you never had a blood test. And you weren't driving drunk.
Him: No. So anyway, on the basis of the blood test they impounded my motorcycle. Every day I was going to the station to try to get my bike back. Meanwhile, every day my boss was calling me up and asking me why I wasn't working.
Me: You can't call in "corrupt"?
Him: In those days, "my bike was impounded by the cops" was code for "I'm in a bar having a drink," or it might as well have been. I was concerned I was going to lose my job. So I went to the police station. I told them it wasn't my blood test, and they said that I'd have to prove that in court. Which could take 10 years.
Me: Did they give your bike back?
Him: No. So I had no transport. So then I decided to plead guilty, to save time. I went in front of the judge and she looked at the paper and she looked at me. And she, of course, had seen a million cases like this before. So she said to the cop next to me, "I'm going to reduce his fine." And the cop didn't say anything.
Me: Did he want a bribe?
Him: No! It turns out that a few weeks earlier his boss had told him that they needed to make 500 arrests for drunk driving in the next month, since they were running some sort of police marketing campaign.
Friend, overhearing this: You're lucky you didn't have to pay the judge!
Him: Yeah, she was one of the good ones.
Another story...
Him: So my aunt had just died and I was transporting a bunch of her old books, papers, etc in my car. Emptying out her house.
Me: Sad.
Him: Anyway, I didn't realize this but as I was driving away from my aunt's house a police inspector started to follow me. Eventually he stopped me. He asked what was in the car and I explained, and he said it looked like I was transporting commercial goods in a personal vehicle. He wrote me a fine for Rs. 3000.
Me: What?
Him: So I went to the police station and told the inspector. I said that my car was full of old and worthless stuff. No one in their right mind would believe those were commercial goods. And the inspector said, "Well, the cop will just say that you changed the stuff in your car."
Me: What?
Him: But the inspector was a pretty decent type - he reduced the offense to a traffic violation.
Me: But you didn't violate any traffic laws.
Him: No. See, the nice thing about paying a bribe in Delhi is that at least if you pay a bribe your work gets done. In Calcutta, you pay a bribe, still nothing happens. So here you have some professionalism in bribe-taking.
Me: Doesn't seem like much to hang onto.
Him: This isn't like America, where you have an accident, you call 911 and someone comes. If I started to have a heart attack now, you wouldn't call 100. You would start to pray. That's why Indians still believe in God, because we don't have 911.
What I'm beginning to realize is that asking the average Indian how corruption impacts his life is like opening a tiny hole in a very large, very plugged tap. It unleashes this massive geyser. Look at the site I Paid A Bribe, which features stories even more absurd than these and also city-by-city bribe stats.
The biggest complaint people seem to have against the bribe ecosystem is that it's inefficient and arbitrary. The lofty Ivory Tower argument that corruption, in some cases, can ensure access to goods for people who can't otherwise afford them, or grease the machinery of an under-funded state, or whatever, don't really seem to play out on the ground. After all, it's not as if there's some central "bribe oversight authority" that ensures work gets done, even after significant bribes have been paid.
Bribery is in fact so lucrative - and so black market - that an entire infrastructure of "agents" has sprung up whose sole job is to navigate the tortured lanes of Indian bureaucracy, greasing the right palms along the way, obtaining things like drivers' licenses, passports and marriage certificates. Consider that driving ability and the speedy acquisition of a drivers license in Delhi are only marginally correlated, if at all, as studies have shown. In fact, that linked study suggests the opposite: the drivers who were willing to pay were more likely to get a license than drivers who actually knew how to drive. When you consider the high number of traffic fatalities and accidents in Delhi, the daily consequences become obvious.
The prominent Indian economist Kaushik Basu, in a working paper, suggests a dramatic new solution to this problem: decriminalize bribe-giving, but not bribe-taking. (To be clear: Basu separates bribes into several categories and his suggestion only applies to bribes given by people to obtain things that should be theirs by law, like a passport or a drivers license or a marriage license.) Other countries have achieved some limited success by decriminilizing one side of a market while increasing the liability of the other, so Basu's theory is not without its precedents.
Here's his argument in a nutshell: "Every time a person gives a bribe...it will be in the interest of the bribe giver to expose this act of corruption (not only will she not be punished but she will be getting back the money that she gave as a bribe). [So] the bribe taker will not want to take the bribe."
I anticipate a few hurdles, though (or, in more logical parlance, problematic assumptions).
The first is: where the heck will the bribe-giver to go expose the crime? There is no government or corporate institution in modern India that is reliably bribe-free. In other words, people who expose corruption will probably suffer even further at the hands of the authorities to whom they complain. This important consideration merits only an inconclusive footnote in Basu's paper: "we ignore here the fact that in a society with widespread corruption there is the problem of 'bribe hierarchy', that is, the possibility that even after one gets caught taking a bribe one may be able to escape by bribing the very person or agency that caught you taking a bribe...In a fuller analysis of policy change it is critical to pay attention to these towers of bribery and how we can strategize to break them down."
Secondly, there's no guarantee that bribe givers will want to report bribery, even to recover their bribe amount, IF paying a bribe means getting speedy access to services. Let's say that it takes 9 months to get a drivers license without a bribe (which is often the case) and 15 days to get a license with a bribe (also often the case). Would the bribe giver rather pay his Rs. 1000 and go to the front of the line, if the alternative is a massively time-consuming and inconvenient process? In rare cases, bribery does ensure more efficient delivery - but only for those who are willing and able to pay bribes. Also, exposing one cop/official as a bribe taker effectively means that the option of paying a bribe to ensure delivery is forever closed to you, since A) that guy gets fired and B) word gets around. Are people willing to give up the option of resorting to bribery? Basu overestimates the amount of faith that Indians have in the state, as well as their fondness for cutting to the front of the queue by whatever means available.
Finally, there's the most obvious problem: how does someone even prove that bribery took place? Is the burden of proof on the accused or the accuser? Indian newspapers are full of dramatic stories of government raids on officials who turn out to have millions of rupees worth of gold bars stashed in their mattresses. But the average corrupt official is a middle class man whose job pays him less than he needs. The cash he earns through bribes immediately goes towards petrol, alcohol or bribes to officials higher up the bribe chain (he too needs to send his son to the best school in Calcutta!) As one police officer very memorably told my friend while explaining why it would be impossible to catch the men who stole a wad of cash from her purse:
"The only thing they stole was cash. Cash is a difficult thing to trace. Let's say you have some cash in your pocket. Tomorrow I take that cash and put it in my pocket. What will you do if I say that cash was mine to begin with?"
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