What makes our municipal bodies a den of corruption?

It was hardly surprising when star comedian Kapil Sharma tweeted a bribe complaint against Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation officials. At the same time many questioned what a Prime Minister has to do with graft charge against officials of a local municipal body and as the elected head of the country PM’s concerns are much larger issues affecting the country. While that may be true the fact is that even the Prime Minister’s intervention could hardly have done anything much beyond saving the day for Sharma to address the larger malaise ailing our municipal bodies. In India, like elsewhere some departments are inherently corrupt, municipal bodies being one of them. It doesn’t matter where and in which cities or state these municipal bodies are situated, one common thread connecting almost all of them is that they are all highly graft-prone.

Let’s take the case of BMC. The body is one of the most cash rich municipal bodies in the country with an annual budget of whooping Rs. 37,000 crore. Controlled by the Sena-BJP alliance it covers an area of 480.24 sq kms and touches lives of more than 1.2 crore Mumbaikars daily as per the census of 2001. Among many other things needed to create and maintain the megapolis’ civil infrastructure, the agency is also tasked with business licensing, health services and disaster management.

It is no more a classified fact that corruption is well entrenched in the BMC. So much so that a 2005 Transparency International Report had to conclude that municipal services in Maharashtra including the BMC rank among the top five corrupt services in the country. It does not stopped there, in a stinging indictment of the agency a division bench of Bombay high court in September 2011 called it as one of the most corrupt institution. Maharshtra’s own Anti-corruption bureau in its annual report ranked it a top offender in corruption cases in 2008.

Time and again claims have been made by the state government and top BMC officials that they are doing as much as they can to get the agency rid of the malaise, but much of it has not got beyond a mere lip service. The seriousness of their efforts was laid bare recently when a RTI reply showed that the agency did not initiated any action against as many as 27 officials who were found to be involved in corruption cases between 2005 and February, 2016 but rather reinstated some of them. It is on record that every year a large number of BMC officials are trapped and arrested for demanding and accepting bribes. A news report published today says that just in the past one year, the state ACB has arrested 20 people working for or associated with the civic body for graft charges.

It is not just about the BMC, the fact is it’s just one of the symbols, and governments world over are struggling to find a way out to get rid of corruption in local governance in their respective countries. Take a name, Africa, Latin America, Asia, even European countries - almost all of them are struggling to cope with the graft affliction in their local governance. Forget treatment, in reality with time scams are becoming larger, the corruption money is growing exponentially from quite a few lacs to now in hundreds of crores.

The question also is that why it is so challenging to the extent of nearly impossible to get BMC rid of the corruption cancer? Let’s take it one by one:

  

-     Size: Is one of the largest local governments in the Asian continent with more than 1.2 crore population under its wings. With more officials, it is harder to keep tabs on each one and establish a decent administration and to monitor their activities.

-     Politics: BMC has an established political culture with politicians brazenly known to influencing plum postings with the most lucrative departments being Building Proposal Department, Slum Rehabilitation and Road Construction. Attempts to rein in the corrupt officials have stumbled due to political interference and had to be abandoned.

-     Transparency: While of late rules have been tweaked to ensure greater transparency but not much has changed. In 2010 CM Prithviraj Chavan said "The BMC lacks transparency”.

-      Accountability: There’s no proper and established mechanism to fix responsibility. For eg. engineers intentionally delay sanctioning projects to pressure builders to pay up.

So, what is the solution? No one will disagree to the fact that Mumbai with all its manifestations still remains the singular super-tall symbol of a rising aspirational India. The Maximum City accounts major portion of India's foreign trade and government revenue, from being one of the foremost centers of education, science and technological research and advancement. The soft power of its cinema industry has mesmerized millions world over and has helped in nation’s global outreach. And therefore leaving its local governance into status-quo mode does not bode well for the future of the city.

The fact is in days to come we will see more steady devolution of powers from the centre down to the municipal level. From health, education to social welfare and commercial licensing, municipal agencies are now playing a far greater role in devising and delivering key public services to the last mile.

First and foremost a strong political will to change things coupled with transparency and active citizen participation is a need of the hour. A proper auditing and monitoring must be ensured to achieve accountability and transparency. And lastly, a size as humongous as the BMC is not conducive to counter corruption. The smaller, the better governance.

@rajivjournalist

Holy cow! When BJP governments took ‘gau seva’ to ludicrous heights

It’s often said that cow, in India, is a political animal. She gives milk as well as votes, and of course cow dung, cakes of which is used as fuel for making food. She’s a holy animal for Hindus, which I too believe in, irrespective of the never ending debate over when and how she became sacred for the Hindus. Unfortunately, she’s is in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Most of us recently saw the video of how four men, suspected of trading in cow skin, were brutally thrashed by a mob of cow vigilante in Gujarat's Somnath district. It was a shameful, inhumane incident and a gross violation of the law and human right. Any sensible government would have had immediately acted against the perpetrators and ensured toughest punishment for them. But that was not to happen. Arrests came late and customary to the gravity of the crime.

 Gujarat’s incident was just the latest in a long series of similar incidents happening across the country, especially in north India, and more so in the BJP ruled states. So, who are these cow vigilantes, the people who may not hesitate to kill for their ‘Gau Raksha Mission’ and how do they work? What inspires them and why all of sudden they have become so obnoxiously notorious?

It’s a well known fact that these cow vigilante groups have been active in India for years, but experts believe they have been emboldened after the BJP government came to power in May 2014. 

The stated aims of these cow vigilantes are to spread awareness about cow, and prevent its slaughter and illegal trade. Driven largely by the faith they out rightly dismiss their links to the ruling BJP or its ideological mentor, the RSS. They are educated, fluent in social media, a far cry from flag-bearing, slogan-shouting activists. They thrive on strong network of informers – which often include vegetable vendors, cobblers, rickshaw pullers etc. Their contention is that they are doing all this to bring ‘sanskaar’ (values) back into society and strive to make cow the national animal, and hang those who slaughter her. In many states they have institutional back-up. For example in Gujarat, a ‘Gau rakshaks’ qualifies for an award of Rs. 500 for every cow he/she rescue under a government scheme. They are eyes and ears of law enforcement agencies in states where law prohibits cow slaughter. “We work with police, alert them whenever our members inform us,” said one of the ‘Gau rakshak’ to a national daily. Their proliferation is also attributed to failure of enforcement agencies tasked with cow protection to implement the law. 

In fact, cow protection has been a key BJP agenda from the beginning, and the animal has helped the party with rich dividend elections after elections.

To understand the importance of cow for the BJP one needs to peep into the election manifesto in various states where it is in power. In 2013 for Rajasthan polls, the party promised to set up a separate Cow Rearing ministry.   The manifesto also vowed cow protection police posts, special insurance policies for cow-shepherds. Similarly, party’s policy statement for Madhya Pradesh promised a separate animal ambulance service, separate cattle grazing land development board and efforts to be made to produce and sell items made out of dung and urine.

In Chhattisgarh a separate board for cattle grazing land, and setting up cow shelters with the latest facilities and amenities was promised in the party’s poll manifesto. In 2012, during the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, it promised a free cow to each of the over five lakh families living below poverty line.

In Haryana, the Manohar Lal Khattar led BJP government has appointed IPS Officer Bharti Arora to supervise & check cow slaughter and smuggling. In Oct 2015 Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij started an online poll, raising the query – should the cow replace the tiger as the national animal? Recently, the Haryana Gau Sewa Ayog sent a proposal to the government to impose 5% 'cow cess' on cinema tickets.

Given BJP’s obsession with cow protection, experts say has led to embolden the cow vigilantes, many of whom were reticent before 2014. The democratic institutions too along with promotion of nonpartisan by the government had out powered such sentiments for years, but things have changed now.

Sadly, opposition leaders too have limited themselves to paying lip-service fearing counter polarization would result into loss of votes. At the same time denouncement of such vigilantism by the government has been far from being forceful. Fearing reprisal, law enforcers are scared to touch the perpetrators and often go lax on them. Silence of both the centre and the state governments have further emboldened these vigilantes and their targets are those who are socially and economically the least empowered citizen of this country, the Dalits and the backward Muslims.

Ironically, despite this obsession of some to protect the cow, India remains one of the largest exporters of beef.

The ‘dirty race’ to be at the top

It was wrestler Narsingh Yadav on Sunday, shot putter Inderjeet Singh today and it won’t be surprising someone else is caught tomorrow or day after in NADA’s anti-doping tests done prior to August Rio Olympics to avoid international embarrassments for the country.

While the accused sportspersons are crying ‘conspiracy’ and that their samples have been ‘tempered with’ to ‘sabotage’ their chances but the fact is in India, as is elsewhere; doping or substance abuse to enhance sporting performance by some sportsperson is an open secret. But what is surprising is that globally we rank 3^rd just behind Russian Federation and Italy in a 2014 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report on ADRV (Anti-Doping Rule Violation). 

With 96 positive cases from India in 2014, the statistics is incriminating and calls for an immediate attention of Indian sports authorities. Worst, the findings say Indian violators have only increased compared to 2013 figures of 91 athletes caught in the ADRV.

With 30 violations, track and field event tops the WADA chart followed by powerlifting (23) and weightlifting (22). 3 cases each were reported from basketball, taekwondo, wrestling and wushu.

So, why do sportsperson cheat? There is no unanimity in opinions or analysis that explains one real reason behind athletes taking to dope to win. And it’s not just amateurs, how can we explain the behavior of professional athletes? If anti-doping agencies are catching the big names, why do athletes continue to dope?

To quote Dick Pound, a longstanding IOC member and former World Anti-Doping Agency chairman there are five main reasons why athletes resort to performance-enhancing drugs. Talking to CNN in November 2012, he had said that "there are reasons but then there are also excuses."

1. "A desire to win at all costs -- even if that means lying.
2.  For financial reasons -- with professionals trying to extend a career. 
3. National pressures -- as exemplified by the old East German system.
4. Individual pressure from coaches -- who get paid better if they coach winners, and that can apply for administrations too.
5. Finally, they dope because they believe they will not get caught -- they believe they are invincible."

The fact and a sad truth is that while athletes have been caught and punished, many – some say most-- do successfully beat the drug testers.

Coming to the Indian context, truth is that many of us unknowingly consume drugs that we hardly know, what impact it will have on us. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics has made many of us immune to this ‘wonder drug’. Many of the daily used drugs too have elements that are banned in the sports. Caffeine, for example, was fine for athletes to use until 1962. Then it was banned by the International Olympic Committee, and it suddenly became an illegal. Then, in 1972, the ban was lifted, and caffeine was suddenly just something you got with your coffee or soda. It was re-banned in 1984. Narsingh Yadav and Inderjeet Singh’s trouble may have to do with this ignorance on what is ok and what is a strict no no. Or medication laced with substances banned in sports.

Till the investigators reach a final conclusion, like most sports fans, I don't want to believe that any of these stellar athletes are guilty, and of course, each individual is innocent until proven otherwise.