Tag Archives: India

Why Hasn’t the Indian Parliament Plugged the Gaping Hole in the Nation’s Anticorruption Law?

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India’s leaders have taken numerous steps in recent years to curb the pervasive corruption that grips the country.  Right to information, whistleblower protection, and other preventive measures have been enacted; an anticorruption agency was created in 2013, and this past April the Cabinet recommended the legislature amend the anticorruption laws to stiffen the penalties for bribery.  But despite the enormous attention the drive to combat corruption has garnered, a September 2015 Supreme Court opinion again pointed to a gaping a hole in the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, the nation’s basic anticorruption law, a hole that is easily repairable but that, until it is, makes convicting bribe-taking public servants far harder than it should be.

Why lawmakers have yet to seal the hole is a mystery. They have known about it since 2011, when the Supreme Court first exposed it.  It is an easy one to close, and until it is closed who knows how many civil servants will demand bribes with near impunity? Continue reading →

Are Anticorruption Parties Doomed to Fail?: Purity, Pragmatism, and Reflections on India’s AAP

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In February, I wrote a post about India’s first official anticorruption party, the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party or Common Man Party) and its landslide victory in the Delhi elections that put its leader, Arvind Kejriwal at the helm of the capital’s government. In my earlier post, I was cautiously optimistic about the potential for the AAP’s electoral success to lead to a major breakthrough in the fight against corruption in India. My optimism was based on the palpable excitement among voters, the outpouring of support for Kejriwal, and the AAP’s zealous promises to deliver on its anticorruption platform.

It’s now been a hundred days since the election results were announced. I was hoping, at this point, to do a post reviewing the AAP’s progress in instituting meaningful anticorruption reform and pushing for more fundamental changes in Indian politics. Alas, although the AAP has been getting a lot of attention in its first few months in office, it’s not for the reasons that I (or most of the AAP’s supporters) had hoped: the party has been consumed by infighting, allegations of dirty politics, and a general perception of dysfunction. And while the AAP’s struggles have been particularly dispiriting, it turns out that the general pattern is not that unusual: many anticorruption parties (ACPs), or parties with primary anticorruption platforms, have emerged all around the world in the last decade or two; these parties often gain power through strong rhetoric and popular support, but very quickly stumble, splinter, and often fail to make any real headway. So was my early optimism (and that of millions of Delhi voters) misplaced? Are ACPs, the AAP included, ultimately destined to fail as governing parties? Continue reading →

An Uncommon Victory for India’s Common Man

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Indian voters signaled their distaste for corruption last year with the historic defeat of the Congress Party, but never have Indian voters spoken so overwhelmingly against corruption as in last week’s landslide victory for India’s first anticorruption party, the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party in the Delhi elections. The AAP won 67 of the 70 seats, leaving just three for the BJP (Prime Minister Modi’s party), and shutting out the Congress Party altogether. Dubbed a “political earthquake,” this win for the AAP, led by Arvind Kejriwal, is monumental for several reasons. Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing the Fight Against Fake Drugs

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Producing and selling falsified medicines—fake drugs deliberately labeled as real and sold to consumers—has been described by the Institute of Medicine as “the perfect crime.” The industry tops $200 billion annually and in Africa alone is responsible for 100,000 deaths each year. The WHO identifies corruption as one of the biggest challenges to keeping these drugs off the market, but the number of access points all along the supply chain—at the point of manufacturer, in customs offices, at distribution centers or individual pharmacies—make reining in corruption a gargantuan task. Governments may squeeze one area—say stricter regulation of customs offices—only to find distribution centers being turned into drug swap shops.

We may, however, be witnessing a shift in how governments approach these issues, moving from confronting corruption head on—which has met with mixed results—to simply circumventing it. The Nigerian experience is noteworthy. Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDAC) has teamed up with Sproxil, a product verification company, to allow consumers to individually verify the authenticity of their drugs. NAFDAC is effectively crowdsourcing its falsified medicines anti-corruption efforts, and with some very positive results. Continue reading →

The Impact of Corruption on Social Mobility

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In a post for the Brookings Institution, David Dollar laments China’s problematically low social mobility, and offers three factors preventing China from becoming a true land of opportunity: (1) the hukou residential registration system (which restricts labor mobility); (2) locally-funded education (which disadvantages poorer rural communities); and (3) growing corruption–because, as Dollar argues, it is “easier for elite families to pass on status and income to their children when there aren’t clear rules and fair competition.” . However, although the view that corruption inhibits social mobility is widespread, and Dollar’s point is partly correct, in reality the picture is more complex. Continue reading →

E-Government and Corruption: Evidence from India

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From the Open Government Initiative for data sharing in the United States to the plurilateral Open Government Partnership abroad, online government or “e-government” is an important trend in global public administration.  In addition to improving government efficiency and citizen access, studies suggest that e-government can also facilitate accountability and reduce corruption.  Of course, there is reason to be skeptical as to whether successes of e-government champions such as Estonia and South Korea can translate to developing countries, where resources are more limited and corruption is often most severe.  But a 2009 study that excluded OECD countries found that a significant increase in the services supplied online could account for as much as a 13 percentile improvement in a country’s ranking in the World Bank’s Control of Corruption index, even after controlling for changes in gross domestic product and press freedom.

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Some Successful Initiatives by Civil Society to Prompt Corruption-Related Litigation

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In an earlier post I promoted a conference on corruption the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict and the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative had planned for June 2014 to discuss ways civil society could stimulate corruption-related litigation, be it criminal investigations or private actions for damages.  The conference was held June 28 with some 100 individuals from civil society, academia, law firms, and governments attending, and one of the highlights was presentations describing successful efforts by civil society groups in India, Nigeria, France, and Switzerland. Continue reading →

The Importance of Personnel Selection in Promoting Government Integrity: Some Evidence from India

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Much of the focus in combating corruption in government bureaucracies focuses on creating the right incentives for public servants after they’ve assumed their positions.  The goal is usually to create a system of rewards and punishments – and perhaps also a professional culture – that incentivizes honest behavior and deters wrongdoing.  Creating those incentives is obviously crucial, but it’s also important not to neglect the selection process – choosing who gets to become a civil servant or public official in the first place.  After all, it’s probably a lot easier to help a basically honest person to resist temptation than it is to discourage a venal opportunist from abusing her position.  Moreover, selecting the wrong people into public service can create a vicious cycle: a government agency with a reputation for corruption will tend to attract individuals who more interested in abusing their positions, while an agency with a reputation for probity will be more likely to attract individuals interested in serving the public good.

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Let’s Create Sub-National Corruption Perception Indexes for the BRICS

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For all their flaws, the major cross-country corruption indexes—Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the World Bank Institute’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), and the like—have been quite useful, both for research (at least when used appropriately) and for advocacy.  But one important limitation of these datasets is that by focusing on corruption (or perceived corruption) at the country level, they may obscure the fact that there can be substantial within-country variation in the level of (perceived) corruption.  This variation may occur across government institutions—the same country may have quite different degrees of corruption in the health sector, the police force, the judiciary, customs, etc.  More pertinent here, there may also be significant heterogeneity across regions, particularly in large countries with substantial political decentralization.  Indeed, numerous studies have exploited within-country regional variation in corruption levels to test various hypotheses about corruption’s causes and consequences; such studies include research on Italy, Russia, China, the Philippines, and the United States, among others.  But these studies typically make use of particular data sets that are not reproduced year-to-year.

As we’re starting to see rapidly diminishing returns from the major cross-country corruption datasets, it is high time for those organizations with the resources and capacity to compile information on corruption perceptions on an ongoing basis to turn their focus to within-country regional variation in corruption.  I propose the creation of a sub-national corruption perceptions index (snCPI), starting with the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which would gather and compile data (primarily perception-based data, perhaps supplemented with more objective data when available) on perceived corruption levels within the major sub-national units (states/provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities) within each of those countries.

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