This Budget, factor in C for corruption

Tucked away on an inside page of this newspaper, a couple of weeks ago, was a news item that I hope caught the attention of the Finance Mini...

Tucked away on an inside page of this newspaper, a couple of weeks ago, was a news item that I hope caught the attention of the Finance Minister while he was making our Budget. It was about CBI 8216;8216;raids8217;8217; on government officials and said that in a single day Rs 19.35 crore worth of assets and money were seized that were 8216;8216;disproportionate8217;8217; to the salaries these officials received. What was most interesting to me, and I hope the Finance Minister, was the extraordinary amount of money even our lowly officials manage to make and what a nationwide phenomenon this has become.

In Hyderabad an Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax, P Ananta Ramulu, was found to have Rs 2.07 crore in various bank accounts whose papers he concealed in clocks, cupboards and wood panels in the family home. This crorepati began his career as a stenographer. In Gorakhpur the CBI found a railway medical officer called Asim Kumar who had Rs 1.58 crore worth of unexplained assets that included a flat in Delhi and a 8216;8216;palatial house8217;8217; in Gorakhpur. What would a railway medical officer make money out of? In Delhi they caught an Income-Tax man called Pramod Kumar Gupta who had Rs 26 lakh in cash and was building himself a many-storied house in Ghaziabad. In Maharashtra they caught two excise officers with flats in Pune and Mumbai, and in Chandigarh an Assistant Provident Fund Commissioner called Manoj Kumar Pandey from whom they recovered Rs 44.5 lakh of unexplained assets. Out of our provident fund money?

Most hard-working Indians in salaried jobs can spend a lifetime working and not save even enough money to buy one home and here we have lowly officials with enough money halfway through their careers to buy several homes. Sick-making? I think so and I hold the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister responsible.

Not just the ones we have now but all their predecessors too and the eve of Budget Day is a good time to discuss this since it is the only time the Finance Minister renders to us an account of how the Government is spending our money. In my view it has been spent on the wrong things for too long. It is on account of bad housekeeping and convoluted, loophole-ridden rules that one of India8217;s international achievements is to always rank high when it comes to measuring the corruption of countries. Think how much Cabinet ministers and high officials must be making if a railway medical officer in Gorakhpur can build himself a palace? Yet, year after year the Finance Minister gets away with not explaining why we spend more money on armies of corrupt, unnecessary officials when we so desperately need to spend much more money on important things.

We need schools. Not tin sheds without desks or chairs in which children sit on the floor and swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter but proper schools with proper classrooms and full-time teachers, not those who are doubling up as census enumerators and election officials. More than 90 per cent of Indian children study in the tin-shed type of school but budget after budget we spend almost nothing on education. We need hospitals. Having spent the past week wandering about one of our better private hospitals in Mumbai I can report that even the best would be considered unhygienic in countries more serious about healthcare. During the course of my wanderings I met doctors who explained that our 8216;8216;polluted8217;8217; atmosphere was the cause of most infections in patients recovering from surgery but they did not notice that outside their own doors there were leaking pipes and dank corridors in which open wiring gathered dust and germs. When you go lower down the healthcare ladder to government, municipal and rural hospitals, standards of hygiene and healthcare are so primitive that those who survive have the gods to thank and not their doctors. Yet, tomorrow if you have the endurance to plow through the Budget8217;s dreary prose you will discover that healthcare is one of our smallest costs.

At every election I cover I hear voters articulate that uniquely Indian wish list: bijli, sadak, pani. Electricity, roads, water. But, decades after freedom from the British Raj the average Indian continues to be deprived of these fundamental 21st-century requisites because bad housekeeping results in us having almost no money to spend after we have paid for running the administration. Continue plowing through the dreary text, go through the small print carefully and you will find that our big costs are mainly the salaries of officials of the kind that the CBI caught with their crores and their palaces. For every one that gets caught there are hundreds who remain uncaught and they get away because our tax and excise rules are so confusing that only officials can understand them. Every confusing detail is a potential source of corruption.

As a hack with an over-developed sense of responsibility I make the effort every year to read the entire Budget down to the small print and confess to understanding not one sentence of the tax and excise rules until someone with a better comprehension of Indian officialese explains them to me. Hidden between the lines are the loopholes on which officialdom thrives.

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This time we have a Prime Minister and a Finance Minister with years of administrative experience so can we hope that they will succeed in giving us a Budget that is written in simple, clear language and that spends our money on the things we really need? I doubt it but I am an irresponsibly optimistic person and so keep hoping that some day we will get a Budget that really makes a difference.

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