We have heard of good governance and bad governance. A good governance is desirable to achieve best possible results, a bad governance can be forgiven and tolerated to some extent for in this case the decisions of the government do not originate out of ulterior motives but are the result of wrong judgement. The agony of Indian Governance is that all decisions are a result of corrupt motivation in one form are the other.
The scams like 2 G, CWG, Adarsh or the mining scam in Karnatka and other states are just a few samples of thousands of such scams going on in this country where the country's resources like minerals, land, spectrum etc. and tax payers money is being wasted at whims and fancies of political bigwigs using all discretionary powers to favour themselves directly or indirectly. The present day government takes credit for the action taken by it in these cases. But imagine the amount of effort that was needed to convince the government for action by media, opposition, civil society, CAG, CVC and even the Supreme Court. The extent of involvement of judiciary, CBI, and other government organs only suggests that they cannot handle five more such cases in a reasonable period of time particularly looking into the attitude and sensitivity of the government in all these cases.
The discretionary powers of the authority are meant to safeguard the interests of the nation, whereas in all these cases discretion was used to favour one party or the other. The nation is given to believe that in 2G spectrum allocation, the decisions were taken in the light of of prevailing government policies on the matter, the policies which were framed some fifteen years back looking into the requirements of that time. These powerful politicians and bureaucrats bend the rules under the garb of discretionary powers to help themselves, their near and dear ones or their favoured ones when looting this nation but when it comes to do the same for the good of the nation they behave worse than clerks even and go verbatim by the rule book. The motivation for doing so is not very hard to understand.
The CAG report on CWG mess is said to be pointing out to procedural irregularities only and there is no mention of the word scam. Even a clerk in the government won't succumb to procedural irregularities unless and until he has his axe to grind. The motivation on the part of of all bigwigs involved to commit such irregularities is not hard to understand. Incidentally even if no procedural irregularities are resorted to, there is still a corruption margin of 30 % of the project cost because of use of less quantity, substandard materials and not adhering to construction specifications which cannot be checked once the civil work is finished.
To control such occurrences we require some sincerity of purpose on the part of those who rule this country. This cannot happen till such time we advocate the motto ' Loyalty to the chair and not to the nation ', and the political parties do rely on persons wedded to moral ethics and who have some substance, sincerity and honesty of purpose in their thought process and not on persons who have been bestowed only with extraordinary gift of the gab to defend even their wrongful actions. Incidentally majority of spokespersons of all political parties are advocates who adhere only to professional ethics where their utmost priority is to defend their client irrespective of the fact whether the client is right or wrong. The moral ethics take a back seat in their profession and they carry the same during their governance stints also.
As a first major step towards fighting corruption let us do away with all discretionary powers so that we graduate into the realm of bad governance from the present state of corrupt governance. By doing so we will only be causing damage to government kitty that too in some cases and will not be filling the coffins of corruption money which has spiraling damaging effect on the economy.
The CAG report on CWG mess is said to be pointing out to procedural irregularities only and there is no mention of the word scam. Even a clerk in the government won't succumb to procedural irregularities unless and until he has his axe to grind. The motivation on the part of of all bigwigs involved to commit such irregularities is not hard to understand. Incidentally even if no procedural irregularities are resorted to, there is still a corruption margin of 30 % of the project cost because of use of less quantity, substandard materials and not adhering to construction specifications which cannot be checked once the civil work is finished.
To control such occurrences we require some sincerity of purpose on the part of those who rule this country. This cannot happen till such time we advocate the motto ' Loyalty to the chair and not to the nation ', and the political parties do rely on persons wedded to moral ethics and who have some substance, sincerity and honesty of purpose in their thought process and not on persons who have been bestowed only with extraordinary gift of the gab to defend even their wrongful actions. Incidentally majority of spokespersons of all political parties are advocates who adhere only to professional ethics where their utmost priority is to defend their client irrespective of the fact whether the client is right or wrong. The moral ethics take a back seat in their profession and they carry the same during their governance stints also.
As a first major step towards fighting corruption let us do away with all discretionary powers so that we graduate into the realm of bad governance from the present state of corrupt governance. By doing so we will only be causing damage to government kitty that too in some cases and will not be filling the coffins of corruption money which has spiraling damaging effect on the economy.
