The culture of CASUAL CORRUPTION

THERE’S A story about a prime minister notorious for his corrupt rule. When state visitors arrived, he would proudly show them around the capital city, boasting about the cut he had personally taken on all large public construction projects.

“See that Municipal Hall,” he would ask the visitor, pointing at an opulent marble-clad building, “that was five per cent. See that skyscraper? Ten per cent. Did you notice the lovely highway you drove on from the airport? 25 per cent and the fancy new airport building? 50 per cent. Finally, look at that bridge over there.”

The visitor looked over at the river being pointed out and scratched his head. There was no bridge in sight.

“But sir,” said the visitor, “I don’t see any bridge there.”

“Yes, yes,” replied the prime minister proudly, “that one was 100 per cent.”

This was a joke my father, Samuel Paul, who wrote some fundamental texts on corruption in India, liked to tell. The situation described by the joke is a classic instance of ‘grand corruption’ which occurs in the context of ‘policy capture’, large investments and contracts and often involves collusion between consenting parties.

Retail or small-time corruption is a hallmark in the delivery of public services and often entails coercion by the party wielding power (patron) towards the supplicant or ‘client’. The will to eliminate corruption is often lacking because, as my Dad put it, “Corruption has been politicised – just as politics has been corrupted.”

How to turn corruption from a lowrisk, high-return enterprise to a highrisk, low-return one may be the crux of the problem. But in order to get there, we need to tackle what I think of as ‘casual corruption’ or the mundane, everyday corruption we live with and barely notice because it is so natural to the way we function.

Until we begin to talk about the predisposition to corrupt attitudes that permeates our lives, how can we realistically tackle grand or even retail corruption?