Tag Archives: India

The Age of Opacity: Reviving India’s Right to Information Act

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Nearly five years ago, Inayat Sabhikhi’s post on this blog praised India’s Right to Information Act (RTIA) —which mandates public authorities to respond in a timely fashion to citizen requests for information—as a “remarkably effective anticorruption tool.” In contrast, last year the Supreme Court of India warned that the Act was “fast becoming a ‘dead letter law.’” What can be done to revitalize the RTIA? An important part of the answer lies in centering the rural poor—increasing awareness, affordability, and accessibility to the RTIA in India’s villages.

Given that many of the RTIA’s most lauded exposés have involved urban political corruption (see here, here, and here), it is sometimes forgotten that the law was fundamentally enacted so as to empower marginalized communities in rural India. In fact, the RTIA owes its existence to the collective efforts of activists who, throughout the 1990s, successfully campaigned to uncover local employment records to ensure fair compensation for small farmers. The RTIA’s promise in exposing rural corruption is illustrated in two cases that occurred shortly after the Act’s passage in 2005:

  • In 2007, farmers in the state of Assam leveraged the RTIA to reveal irregularities in the operation of the public system for distributing food to people living below the poverty. A further investigation revealed that local officials had diverted the rice to themselves, selling it on the black market at a sevenfold price increase.
  • In 2008, activists in the state of Punjab submitted RTIA applications to understand why federal money earmarked to build rural housing had not been distributed to the intended beneficiaries. As the requested reports indicated, the grants had been embezzled by village council members, who built houses for themselves. 

While these examples demonstrate that the RTIA’s potential to give rural citizens greater ability to hold local elites accountable, such examples are the exception rather than the rule. Although corruption is rampant in rural India (see here, here, here, and here), RTI requests in villages are all too rare. While 70% of India’s population lives in rural areas, barely 25% of RTI applications come from villages, and in some states that percentage is as low as 11%. In short, the communities with the most to gain from the RTIA are the ones that have used it the least.

Two reforms would help address this problem: 

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What’s Corruption Got to Do With It? The Role of Anticorruption Rhetoric in Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Protests

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Doctors in in the Indian city of Kolkata have been protesting and striking against the state’s ruling political regime since August 2024, with no end to the demonstrations in sight. The protests were initially sparked by the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor at R.G. Kar Medical Hospital, with anti-misogyny as the protesters’ central rallying cry. The “Reclaim the Night” march in Kolkata, which inspired parallel marches across India and garnered international attention, epitomized this early focus. In recent months, however, the protests have evolved into a broader movement against corruption. As one politician noted in his resignation letter, “the present outpouring of public anger is against this unchecked overbearing attitude of the corrupt.”

This might appear puzzling, as this anticorruption rhetoric seems rather disconnected from the movement’s original focus on justice for the victim and the broader culture of misogyny and violence against women. But there are at least three reasons why protests that originated in outrage over violence and misogyny have evolved into protests that foreground concerns about corruption.

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The Kerjiwal Case and the Erosion of Transparency and Accountability in India

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Former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal rose to power championing anticorruption in Indian politics. But last March, India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), a semi-independent agency tasked with enforcing anticorruption laws, arrested Kejriwal in connection with allegations that his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) received over $10 million in kickbacks in exchange for favorable liquor licenses in Delhi. This is not the first time that the AAP—a self-described anticorruption party—has been implicated in a corruption scandal (see here and here). Perhaps Kejriwal is yet another example of a politician caught betraying in private the principles he’d championed in public. 

But several observers have raised concerns about Kejriwal’s arrest, and suggested that it may reflect a disturbing politicization of anticorruption enforcement under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For one thing, critics point to the suspicious timing of the arrest: Kejriwal was arrested just weeks before India’s national elections, following two years of investigation with no prior action. And Kejriwal’s arrest may have distracted public attention from a potential corruption scandal that would affect Modi’s party, the BJP, involving BJP fundraising from anonymous corporate donations through a system that the Indian Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional. More generally, Kejriwal’s arrest fit a troubling pattern: Since 2014, 95% of the ED’s cases are against politicians from minority parties (under the previous regime, the number was 54%). Even more disturbing, 23 of the last 25 politicians probed for corruption saw charges dropped after switching allegiances to the BJP. And just a month prior to Kejriwal’s arrest, Hemant Soren, another popular Chief Minister critical of the BJP, was arrested on corruption charges.

So, is this a case where a hypocritical politician is being held accountable for betraying his own principles? Or is this an instance in which anticorruption enforcement has been weaponized by the incumbent president to discredit and punish political adversaries? Or both? How are citizens to know? Uncovering the truth is especially difficult when the three pillars meant to ensure transparency and accountability in Indian anticorruption efforts—the judiciary, the media, and civic organizations—appear increasingly susceptible to political and systemic pressures. When these institutions fail to inspire public confidence, the boundary between legitimate accountability and political retribution is obscured. Kejriwal’s case highlights the need to examine the state of these pillars and their ability to fulfill their critical roles in such contentious cases. 

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Cracking Down on Conflict of Interest in Indian Cricket

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Cricket has become a mainstay of India’s sports culture, particularly after the Indian Men’s Cricket Team brought home its first World Cup in 1983. Yet Indian cricket has also been rocked by numerous embarrassing corruption scandals, many involving match-fixing and illegal betting (see, for example, here and here). These scandals have also prompted questions about more pervasive corruption, cronyism, and conflict of interest in the sport’s governing bodies, particularly the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). It has proven especially difficult to root out these problems because the BCCI is considered a private organization, and is therefore not covered by India’s Prevention of Corruption Act (PoCA) and Right to Information (RTI) Act. Notably, this is something of an anomaly: Most other sports authorities in India are “National Sports Federations,” autonomous bodies that are considered public bodies for legal purposes. Yet the BCCI has so far successfully resisted being similarly classified, on the grounds that, unlike these other sports authorities, it does not receive direct financial support from the state.

This should change, on grounds of both law and policy. As a legal matter, the BCCI meets the criteria for classification as a public body. As a policy matter, subjecting the BCCI to the PoCA, RTI Act, and other Indian anticorruption and pro-transparency laws would go a long way to cleaning up the corruption mess in Indian cricket. Continue reading →

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Andreas Bågenholm and Rekha Diwakar

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, host Dan Hough interviews Andreas Bågenholm (University of Gothenburg) and Rekha Diwakar (University of Sussex) about anticorruption political parties. These parties have proliferated in different parts of the world in the last two decades. Andreas and Rekha draw on their research in Europe and India respectively to talk about where these parties come from and what they stand for. They discuss how these parties have actually performed when they have entered into government, assessing in particular the track record of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack was originally founded as a collaborative effort between GAB and the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN). It is now hosted and managed by the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends!

Curbing Corruption in India’s Healthcare System

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The Indian healthcare system is rife with corruption, and much of this corruption arises from the way that healthcare is regulated (or not). Because healthcare in India is inexpensive, at least by Western standards, private health insurance is relatively rare, and a sizeable majority of total health expenditures are made out-of-pocket. With little regulation, and without much meaningful price negotiation by either the government or private insurance companies, India’s healthcare system has become a vast “network of unregulated private sector hospitals.” This lack of regulation, coupled with intense competition, encourages doctors (who are often under substantial financial pressure) “to enter a happy axis of corruption where they routinely prescribe expensive investigations and perform operations which a patient might not need” in order to increase their profit margins. Doctors have also been known to take bribes from other healthcare entities in return for patient referrals, or to accept kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies disguised as “professional fees” in order to outcompete other private hospitals. As a recent WHO-Eurohealth publication concluded, health sector corruption in India includes not only “collusion, bribes and kickbacks in procurement which may result in overpayment for goods and contracted services” and doctors’ willingness to accept “payments in exchange for special privileges or treatment,” but also “distort[ions in] medical professionals’ prescribing practices.” 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has sought to address some of these concerns through a healthcare initiative known as PMJAY. The main objective of this program is to increase access to healthcare for the poorest 50% of the population—approximately 700 million people—who are given biometric government “smart cards” to purchase eligible inpatient healthcare services at both private and public hospitals. But while PMJAY is principally designed as a system for subsidizing healthcare for low-income people, it also serves as an anticorruption tool by bringing under government oversight millions of previously unregulated out-of-pocket healthcare transactions, requiring enrolled physicians to acquire digital pre-authorization before administering nonemergency services to PMJAY beneficiaries, and giving the government more power to negotiate with private hospitals participating in the program over healthcare rates. PMJAY’s computerized billing platform also serves a surprising secondary role as an AI-powered “comprehensive fraud analytics solution” for millions of transactions that were previously beyond the government’s reach. The program has already detected over 18,000 fraudulent insurance transactions, leading to penalties against hundreds of healthcare entities so far. The government has even made a list of “corrupt” hospitals available on the PMJAY website. Given PMJAY’s early successes, the government should expand the program. Not only would this increase healthcare access in general—a worthy aim in its own right—but it would further reduce corruption in the healthcare system. This is more easily said than done, however, in light of several practical obstacles to further expansions.

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Guest Post: Fighting Corruption Through Social Audits in India: How Far Can Voice Get Without Teeth?

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Today’s Guest Post is from Suchi Pande, Scholar in Residence at American University’s Accountability Research Center and Center Founder and Director AU Professor Jonathan Fox.

India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee became a lifeline for migrant labor arbitrarily expelled from cities and left stranded and broke due to COVID-19 lockdowns. One of the largest employment safety net program in the world, it comes with a mandate for state governments to carry out “social audits,” a procedure empowering its beneficiaries to monitor leakages and the denial of rights resulting from the arbitrary exercise of power across India’s 600,000 villages. In short, to spotlight corruption.

How? With a social audit, program beneficiaries publicly scrutinize its implementation and government actors must respond to shortcomings in officially convened public forums and redress grievances. The audits date to a 2005 law driven by a combination of a grassroots advocacy campaign and a reform-minded government.  Social audits can engage populations directly in the fight against corruption where:

  1. the audit reveals corruption in some form, such as the leakage (embezzlement) of program funds, demands for bribes to release the funds, or the outright denial of participants rights to the funds;
  2. those conducting the audit have the capacity to communicate their findings clearly and understandably to the affected individuals or group;
  3. those affected are informed of the findings and understand the violation of the law or policy that led to the losses; and
  4. a third party — government agency or civil society group — convenes a public forum where government officials and elected representatives discuss the audit findings in an atmosphere free from reprisal, where the affected persons can participate and vouch for the accuracy of findings.
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Reforming the Indian Judiciary from the Bottom Up

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“Corruption is as old as society. Corruption has become a way of life, [an] acceptable way of life. And judges don’t drop from heaven.” 

This was former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi’s reply when a journalist asked him about corruption in India’s courts. Such a statement may seem extraordinary coming from a former Chief Justice, but he is not alone in holding this belief. Two other former Chief Justices have acknowledged the pervasive corruption problem facing India’s judiciary, particularly in the lower courts where most Indians interact with the judicial system. And this perception is backed up by quantitative evidence: according to Transparency International, 32% of Indians who used the courts in 2020 had paid a bribe that year, while 38% resorted to personal connections to navigate the system. 

Much of the public outrage over India’s judicial corruption has understandably been directed toward individual corrupt judges (see here, here, and here), but the problem reflects deeper systemic issues—perhaps most importantly, the massive case backlog. There are currently forty million pending court cases in the country’s District Courts and Subordinate Courts, and every year that number grows by millions more. By some estimates, it would take 400 years for the judiciary to clear the backlog at its current rate (and that’s assuming no new cases are filed in the meantime). It takes an average of 35 months to resolve a legal issue in India, the longest in the world according to one report. And many cases take much longer: over half a million cases have been pending for over twenty years.

This case backlog, and the glacial pace of Indian justice, is not only a crisis for the administration of justice but also a breeding ground for corruption. Given the extraordinary delays, those litigants who can afford to do so have strong incentives to pay bribes or use connections to get a faster verdict. (Most bribes are paid to court officials or middlemen, including lawyers, rather than directly to judges.) And, without excusing those judges who violate their oaths of office, it’s not that surprising that overworked, underpaid judges dealing with crushing caseloads would be tempted to accept these under-the-table payments. In essence, then, the extreme case backlog in the lower courts has created something of a two-track system, one for those that can pay the price to skip the line, and one for everyone else.

As the number of pending cases continues to balloon, this problem is only going to get worse. While punishing those judges (and their staff) who are caught requesting or receiving bribes—and those litigants and facilitators who offer those bribes—may be morally and legally justified, cracking down on individual wrongdoers is not enough to address the structural roots of India’s judicial corruption problem. 

What can be done? Though there are no easy solutions, India needs to adopt reforms to increase both the quantity and the quality of its lower court judges:

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Tackling Corruption While Preserving Judicial Independence: Lessons from India’s Supreme Court 

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In India, Justices of the Supreme Court and judges of India’s 25 regional High Courts are appointed through a process known as the Collegium System. Although the Constitution vests the appointment power in the President of India, the President may only appoint a Supreme Court or High Court nominee recommended by a body called the Collegium, which consists of the Chief Justice, the four other senior-most Supreme Court Justices, and, in the case of High Court nominees, the senior-most judge on the High Court of the prospective appointee.

This system, which developed over the 1980s and 1990s as part of a decades-long tug-of-war between the branches of government, is controversial. Some critics have argued that the Collegium, which operates largely as a black box, leads to the selection of judges based on cronyism and quid pro quos, regardless of a nominee’s merit or scruples. Notably, critics contend, the Collegium System allows for the appointment of corrupt judges because the secrecy of the Collegium’s deliberations prevents accusations of impropriety against those nominees from becoming public. In buttressing this claim, critics point to instances of High Court judges who have been credibly accused of corruption, including one who was formally charged at the end of last year for taking a bribe in exchange for a favorable verdict. Critics also contend that the Collegium System exacerbates judicial corruption through another, more indirect channel: The Collegium’s slow pace has left hundreds of High Court seats vacant, which exacerbates the Indian court system’s extreme case backlog. That backlog, in turn, encourages petty bribery, as many frustrated litigants would prefer to bribe a judge or court official to jump the line or get a case dismissed rather than wait years for a final resolution. Even former Chief Justice V.N. Khare acknowledged that bribes for bail are rampant in the lower courts given the delays litigants may face down the line.

In response to these concerns, the Indian Parliament, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, voted overwhelmingly in 2014 to amend the Indian Constitution to replace the Collegium with a National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) composed of representatives from all three branches. But before the law could go into effect, the Supreme Court ruled it an unconstitutional threat to judicial independence. While calls for reform temporarily abated, just last December a member of Modi’s cabinet expressed support for reintroducing the NJAC amendment to replace the Collegium System.

Any such attempt, however, would be misguided. Anti-Collegium reforms like the NJAC would undermine India’s hard-won judicial independence, and the corruption problem these reforms would purport to solve has been greatly exaggerated.

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“Elect a Government That Works”: A Case Study in Populism and Corruption from India 

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As the United States was reeling from President Richard Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal, another imperiled leader—Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi—was fighting for her political life thousands of miles away. Although Gandhi and Nixon never got along, their stories overlap. Both barely squeaked into power after close elections in the late 1960s, but then won resounding reelection victories in the early 1970s. Gandhi’s political fortunes, like Nixon’s, took a turn for the worse shortly after reelection, in light of substantiated accusations of illegal campaign activity. But at this point, Nixon and Gandhi’s stories diverge. Unlike Nixon, Gandhi stayed the course and refused to resign. And in the end she prevailed: Gandhi was popularly elected three times with some of the largest governing majorities in Indian history.

How did Gandhi convince the public to reelect her, despite her known, widespread abuses of authority? How did a leader ensnared in scandal and corruption hold onto power to become one of the most beloved leaders in the world’s largest democracy? The answer to these questions may lie in Gandhi’s concentrated emphasis on left-wing populism. She argued to voters that she alone was most capable of effectuating change for India and its most needy citizens by enacting social programs and redistributing wealth. Additionally, Gandhi spent much of her time as Prime Minister consolidating her power within the party and the central government. This enabled much of the corruption that marked her rule but was also what allowed her to argue to the public that she was uniquely capable of fixing the nation’s problems.

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