Bribery146;s dividends

Cash in on India8217;s unique talent in the field

A futile trip to the police station to report a wallet picked, an agonising struggle to get a babu to issue me a new licence, a ten-rupee bribe to a bus ticket inspector for a wrongly issued ticket. Little wonder India is topping the bribery charts.

Consider then my fool-proof method of poverty alleviation. Before the election, the prospective candidate submits his project plan: ie, the precise amount he plans to raise by way of bribes, the public institutions through which he plans to raise them and, if necessary, the babus who will assist him. Next, he forms a joint stock company with prospective voters getting a minority shareholding, with the majority stake being reserved for the party bosses. So if the candidate gets elected, he can go about doing his now perfectly legitimate 8216;job8217; as promoter of the company: raising revenue.

If he is adept at the art of bargaining, he may soon even discover that he8217;s doing better than he expected. If that8217;s the case, the shareholders will be mightily pleased with the fact that with their vote, their anointed leader has become a source of income for them. The larger a family, the more shares its gets, and this translates into bigger profits. For those who move from time to time and suffer the problem of not being in a particular place long enough to vote in the elections, special mutual funds can be set up where they can invest in certain shares and watch the profits come racing in.

The risk? Only one. The uncertainty of whether a chosen candidate will win. Well, that risk can be handled by some clever diversification. Each member of the family can vote for a different candidate so that the possibility of an outright loss is avoided. The risk-return principle spares no business venture but if you, by chance of course, have insider information, everyone in the family can go all out for the golden candidate and maximise returns.

Why, perhaps these shares could even be traded on the bourses. The likes of Lalu Yadav at Rs 2,000 and a untested politician at Rs 100. And the best part of this scheme? For the first time, the benefits will reach the poor, since they are the only ones who vote.