Corruption in India: 'All your life you pay for things that should be free'

In an article today, The Guardian's South Asia correspondent Jason Burke covers the ongoing controversy in India over the arrest of anti-corruption campaigners and takes stock of the culture of corruption that is so prevalent in the sub-continent:

Vishal is an ordinary man with an ordinary story of corruption in India. He lives in east Delhi, part of the traffic-choked sprawl of India's capital. He owns a fried chicken takeaway similar to thousands of others that have sprung up in recent years to serve the new tastes of the burgeoning middle class.

And he faces an ordinary Indian daily routine of petty corruption. The number of people Vishal has to pay off is bewildering. There are the local beat constables who take free lunches, and the more senior police officers who can cause problems with opening hours. They take 10,000 rupees (£130) on the 10th of each month to allow Vishal to stay open late.

Then there are the officials from various local authorities who also receive regular payments – around £50 per month – to ensure that health, safety and hygiene inspections go smoothly.

"Of the 40,000 rupees (£520) I earn a month from my restaurant, I pay at least a third in bribes," Vishal, 26, said. But bribery also extends into his personal life. Vishal has two young children and to get the eldest in to the best local school he paid a "donation" of 25,000 rupees (£3,400) in cash to the headmaster.

A driving licence needed another bribe. Getting an appointment with a competent public doctor cost a substantial amount. And then there are the traffic police. Every other week Vishal says he is stopped, told he has committed an offence and made to pay 100 rupees (£1.25), the standard fee to avoid "too much bother".

"I am so disappointed [about] everything you have to pay," he said. "And no one does anything. The politicians won't do anything because they are all corrupt too."

Such sentiments are widespread in India and explain the sudden outpouring of anger over recent days as tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest about the arrest of anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare.

Though a string of major corruption scandals such as the telecoms licence scam that cost the country up to £26bn, and the alleged fraud surrounding the high-profile Commonwealth Games in Delhi, has fuelled some of the fury, it is the grinding daily routine of petty corruption that is at the root.

"You pay for a birth certificate, a death certificate," said Varun Mishra, a 30-year-old software engineer and one of thousands who marched in Delhi to support Hazare. "All your life you pay. And for what? For things that should be free."

Hazare, 74, has harnessed this grassroots frustration to launch a popular movement. Having been jailed as a threat to public order, he went on hunger strike and refused to leave prison when released. He has finally left jail, having been granted permission to hold a 15-day fast in a public park.

His public relations team has run rings around clumsy and slow official spokesmen. India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has an impeccable reputation for personal probity but has looked distant and out of touch.

Hazare is campaigning for a powerful new anti-corruption ombudsman with the right to investigate senior politicians, officials and judges. His critics say this would be undemocratic, and worry about the division of powers. But for people like restaurateur Vishal, Hazare is a hero. "At least he is doing something," he said. "No one else is."

Though bribery, or "graft", is a fact of life for more or less everybody in India, the demonstrators are largely urban, educated and relatively well-off. "What you are seeing on the street is a middle-class rebellion," said Mohan Guruswamy, a former senior official in the ministry of finance and founder of the Centre for Policy Alternatives thinktank.

There are reports in local media that call centres and other back office operations in IT hubs such as Gurgaon, a satellite town of Delhi, and Bengaluru, the southern city, have faced staffing problems with up to half of workers joining the protests. Teachers, lawyers and medical professionals have also featured prominently.

Support for Hazare is particularly strong among those who have benefited most from India's recent breakneck economic development but are frustrated by a largely unreformed public sector that delivers poor and haphazard services. They are often the young.

Many of those who waited outside Tihar jail in Delhi to greet Hazare on his triumphant exit were in their teens or even younger. One 12-year-old carried a placard saying "save my future".

Tens of millions of school and college-leavers pour into the Indian jobs market each year. State institutions have not kept pace with aspirations raised by years of rapid economic growth and with skill levels low and good jobs scare, unrest could rise.

Senior Congress party politicians this week argued that some level of graft was "inevitable" in a developing economy. However, analysts said the extent of the problem in India – which ranks at 87 out of 178 on the campaign group Transparency International's index of corruption – is unique. "India is comparable to China, doing better than Russia, less well than Brazil," said Robin Hodess, the group's research director. "But bureaucratic and petty corruption is extreme in India."

Some say India's generally patchy law enforcement is to blame. "We are politically advanced in terms of institutions," said Guruswamy. "We have courts, a parliament and a long tradition of democracy ... but very few people are ever held to account." Last week a senior judge faced unprecedented impeachment proceedings 25 years after the alleged offence.

Others say those who pay the bribes are to blame too. One supreme court lawyer who refused demands for commissions in return for sanctioning payment for work he had done for the government, said giving in to corruption could be down to "deep powerlessness" or simply a "I just want to get on with my day" type of attitude. "As Indians we see corruption as something that permeates our lives, like air pollution, but we need to think much more carefully about it," he said.

Raghu Thoniparambil, who runs the website ipaidabribe.com, pointed out that corruption in the private sector was just as prevalent. "All these protests are very inspiring but will people really change? I don't know," he said.

Less ambitious and spectacular measures could have more impact than the ombudsman office Hazare and his followers want to create, Thoniparambil argues.

As well as perceptions of general corruption, Transparency International also compiles an index of nations where bribes are paid most frequently, particularly in business. India ranks 19 out of 22, above Mexico, Russia and China.

Manu Joseph, editor of the news magazine Open, speaks of "hypocrisy". "The Indian relationship with corruption is very complex and politicians are representative of society as a whole," he said.

But the widespread anger is also due to a sense that modern India not only deserves better but needs to at least moderate rampant corruption to compete on the world stage.

The most high profile cases have already damaged the nation's image sufficiently to slow economic growth. One text message circulating in India last week focused on the huge sums of "black money" illegally stashed by wealthy Indians in overseas assets and bank accounts. The return of these funds could pay for "Oxford-like universities", borders stronger than "the China wall" and roads "like in Paris", it said.

"We want a great country, stronger than the US, UK and Australia," said 18-year-old Sushil Kumar as he waited for the protest march from Hazare's jail to start. "India will be great, with its traditions, its culture. But we have to beat corruption."

The anti-bribery website

Launched last October, ipaidabribe.com is the brainchild of Raghunandan Thoniparambil, a retired official from the elite Indian Administrative Service.

By Friday 12,076 people had posted their personal stories of graft for all to see. They included businessmen forced to pay 50 rupees (70p) to traffic police, 300 rupees (£3.20) paid for a passport verification, 40,000 rupees (£540) handed over to have property registered, 5,000 rupees (£67) for a birth certificate and travellers who had to give 100 rupees (£1.30) to get berths on otherwise full express trains. Software takes names off the site.

"The aim is not to identify people but to identify the problem," Thoniparambil said. In June, after a BBC report about ipaidabribe.com several similar sites opened in China. Within two weeks they were shut down.

"In India we are sometimes a little slow or dysfunctional but civil society, simple democracy can make a huge difference," added Thoniparambil.

BBC News: China's first aircraft carrier 'starts sea trials'

BBC News reports today on the 'unveiling' of China's worst kept secret of the last ten years:

The Chinese navy's first aircraft carrier has begun its sea trials, the state-run Xinhua news agency has said. It quoted military sources as saying that the refitted former Soviet warship left its shipyard in the north-east and the trial "would not take a long time".

The move is likely to raise fresh concerns over China's rapid military build-up. Beijing is currently involved in several maritime territorial disputes, particularly in the South China Sea.

The aircraft carrier left its shipyard at Dalian Port in northeast Liaoning Province on Wednesday morning, Xinhua reported.

"Military sources said that the first sea trial was in line with the schedule of the carrier refitting project," it said. "After returning from the sea trial, the aircraft carrier will continue refit and test work." Xinhua did not provide any further details.

The BBC's Michael Bristow in Beijing says China is years away from being able to deploy this carrier as a potent military tool. Even so, the country's neighbours will be worried.

Many are involved in disputes with China over maritime borders - and they will be looking anxiously at Beijing's naval build-up, our correspondent says.

The article continues, as does other analysis worth checking:

Aircraft carrier symbol of China's naval ambitions

China extending military reach

Viewpoint: A new Sino-US high-tech arms race?

The Guardian offers an alternative to the US-centric analysis of rising Chinese military power, focusing instead on the (potential) naval rivalry with India:

China's first aircraft carrier launches with pride amid regional tensions

Last week, Japan's annual defence report said the Chinese navy were likely to increase activities around Japan and warned that China had acted "in a way seen as coercive" in conflicts. Beijing responded by accusing Tokyo of irresponsible exaggeration. The test is a small step in the long journey towards building a viable carrier group, but it is already stoking unease in India, and prompting fears of an arms race between Asia's two emerging powers.

The Indian Ocean is fast becoming a zone of contested influence between Beijing and Delhi. Indian strategists have been particularly worried by a string of ports constructed with Chinese assistance in Burma, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

"The carrier will add a new dimension to the burgeoning Chinese navy which could provide a major challenge to India in its backyard, the Indian Ocean," the Times of India commented on Wednesday.

Despite a £10bn modernisation programme, much of the Indian armed forces' on equipment is outdated, and efforts to build or buy aircraft carriers have been hampered by political wrangling and red tape.

The Indian navy has a small 50-year old 28,000-tonne carrier, which it bought from the UK in 1987, but it aims to have at least two aircraft carrier battle groups in operation by 2015.

The ongoing refit of the 44,570-tonne Admiral Gorshkov, purchased from Russia in 2005, and the construction in India of a new 40,000-tonne carrier are expected to be completed in the coming three to four years."We are definitely looking at deploying two aircraft carriers by the middle of this decade,'' assistant chief of naval staff (foreign cooperation and intelligence) Rear Admiral Anil Chawla said earlier this year.

Defence analyst Ajaj Shukla said that India retains the lead in naval aviation, but that there was a clear fear of "the projection of Chinese power into the northern Indian Ocean in a new way".

"The Chinese are at an earlier stage but once they set their minds to operating a naval air arm they will catch up pretty fast so it is being carefully watched," he said.

Global carbon emissions reach record, says IAE

BBC News has a brief summary of a worrying report from the International Energy Agency:

Global carbon emissions reached a record level last year, according to the International Energy Agency (IAE). The watchdog says emissions rose again after a dip caused by the financial crisis in 2009, and ended 5% up from the previous record in 2008. China and India account for most of the rise, though emissions have also grown in developed countries.

The increase raises doubts over whether planned curbs on greenhouse emissions will be achieved, the group says. At a meeting last year in Cancun, Mexico, world leaders agreed that deep cuts were needed to limit the rise in global temperature to 2C above pre-industrial levels. But according to the IAE's estimate, CO2 emissions reached a record 30.6 gigatonnes in 2010.

The IEA's Fatih Birol said the finding was "another wake-up call".

"The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020 if the 2C target is to be attained," he added.

"Unless bold and decisive decisions are made very soon, it will be extremely challenging to succeed in achieving this global goal agreed in Cancun."

BBC News: The Kashmiri fighters who lost their cause

BBC News Online has published an interesting article today concerning the plight of "freedom fighters" (some would call them "terrorists") battling for Kashmiri independence, free of both India and Pakistan.

In Kashmir, such groups are called pro-independence, as opposed to pro-Pakistan groups that advocate union with Pakistan.

Pakistan and India went to war over Kashmir in 1948. A ceasefire negotiated by the United Nations left the region divided between the two countries, pending a final resolution which still remains elusive.

While initially there was a predominantly pro-Pakistan sentiment across the region, over the last few decades many pro-independence groups have emerged.

It is interesting to read the story of militants caught between two major players in the region.

Economist Videographic: India, Pakistan and Kashmir

Exactly one year ago, The Economist published a very useful videographic on an enduring flashpoint between the two nuclear powers in South Asia. Kashmir's history of division and conflict are explored:

Obama backs India on permanent Security Council seat

Big news yesterday, reported (amongst others) by BBC News and arising from US President Barack Obama's current visit to India and several other Asian states:

US President Barack Obama has backed India's ambition for permanent membership of the UN Security Council. In an address to India's parliament at the end of a three-day visit, Mr Obama lavishly praised India's development.

His remarks will delight India, which has been lobbying for a seat at the UN's top table for years. Analysts say it does not mean India will get a permanent seat immediately; the unspecified UN reforms Mr Obama mentioned could take years.

India's long-term rival Pakistan issued a quick response opposing the move, saying the US should not be swayed by "power politics".

Mr Obama said the Washington-Delhi relationship would be one of this century's defining partnerships. The loudest applause came when Mr Obama told dignitaries: "As two global leaders, the United States and India can partner for global security - especially as India serves on the Security Council over the next two years.

"Indeed the just and sustainable international order that America seeks includes a United Nations that is efficient, effective, credible and legitimate.

"And that is why I can say today, in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed United Nations Security Council that includes India as a permanent member."

There are currently five permanent members of the Security Council: the US, China, France, the UK and Russia, which have the power to veto resolutions. Some nations have criticised the format as not reflecting the 21st century world.

The article goes on to discuss the possible regional political ramifications and describes the increasingly close nature of the US-India relationship. Take a look!

Economist Videographic: Asia's Growing Economic Power

The Economist earlier this year published a videographic outlining Asia's growing economic power, with implications for rival regions and superpowers. A balanced view: "Asia is regaining the economic dominance it enjoyed a millennium ago - but it still has some way to go...":

Economist: China and India - a Himalayan Rivalry

The Economist today published a key article detailing the rise of two potential rival superpowers in Asia: China and India. The article gives close attention to the accompanying rise in tension—not least over outstanding sovereign territory claims—but also gives some hope for the future.

The Leader in The Economist characterises India-China rivalry as the "Contest of the Century". Both articles well worth a read!