Sir,

It is difficult to fathom how deeply and steeply we have been sucked in the quicksand and drowned ourselves in the sea of corruption. Just three individuals — Nirav Modi, Vijay Mallya and Kothari — have plundered the banks to the tune of roughly Rs. 25,000 crore! This trio is just a sample. There are umpteen borrowers waiting in the wings to cheat lakhs of crores. This is our Incredible India!

Our genius in finding short- cuts to reach our notorious goals is unparalleled, never mind short-circuiting a whole lot of tax-payers and et-al in the process. Greed being the prime driver.

When we were young, our parents taught us “when wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost something is lost and when character is lost everything is lost.” Presumably, for the new generation, “when wealth is lost, everything is lost”! Haven’t we seen politicians/leaders wearing thick golden neck chains, wrist bands and rings in all ten fingers?

What will not go away is the corruption at the ‘ground level.’ How many of us have got our work done without being harassed and without paying bribes at MUDA, MCC, Police Station, PWD, Revenue Department, Commercial Tax to name a few? Unless the politician-bureaucrat nexus is tackled with an iron-hand and in a wholesale manner, there is no hope.

In a vast country like ours with innumerable bribe-givers and bribe-takers, once in a way we hear Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) ‘catching’ some poor corrupt officials. Action stops after we have read the ‘seizing’ of their long list of ‘mouth-watering’ assets. Once in a blue moon some unfortunate guy gets sacked. Shouldn’t we learn  from advanced countries how swiftly they tackle corruption?

If a thousand and odd officials all over India had been dismissed for corruption in the last few years, the emergence of high-profile looters with disdain towards the laws of the land would probably have been deterred. ‘Demonetisation’ and several other well-intentioned programmes of the government, because of rampant corruption, now look ‘exercises in futility’!

– Mubasher Mirza, Bannimantap ‘C’ Layout, 20.3.2018

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