Today in India, corruption or “the use of public office for private profit” pervades the entire gamut of life, public and private. It is, as the distinguished author of Corruption in India N Vittal, former Chief Vigilance Commissioner puts it “anti-national, anti-development and anti-poor”. It is such an undeniable social reality today that it is impossible to exist without it. If the price of survival today is the small bribe, the price of rapid advancement is the big bribe. The ubiquity of the first transforms the morality of the ordinary citizen to the ethical neutrality of the bribe and mentally prepares him to accept it as the passport to success. The immorality of the bribe is destigmatized and neutralized; hence bribery thrives. Need necessitates it. Greed nourishes it. In the pell-mell fast of life in today’s information age, the bureaucracy is enmeshed in the coils of an antiquated feudal-colonial system that is in no hurry to deliver the basic goods and services for a citizen to exist. The helpless Indian citizen has therefore adapted himself to the exigencies of life by sacrificing morality at the altar of expediency.

The laudable purpose of this book is “to spark a debate” to “sensitize and mentally empower every Indian who wants to fight corruption” and “help India emerge as a cleaner country.” Whether it will serve this purpose or not remains to be seen, for as the author confesses “everybody talks about corruption but does nothing about it.” The author points out the root causes of corruption with clinical precision: declining social mores – addiction to the consumerist ethos, enslavement to material gratification and success and ethical neutrality. The system of governance is exemplified by a vexatious red-tapeism and slowness, mindless and irrelevant procedures, rules and formalities that aggravate the agony of waiting for something routine, and a thoughtless opacity, an intolerable insensitivity, a repulsive incivility, a presumptuous pedantry and overweening arbitrariness in the several areas of discretion, an unimaginable absence of accountability, a fool-proof safety net for non-performing public servants, and the unpredictability of an antiquated criminal justice system that favours the corrupt offenders. In short, we have structures that do not function: we have too much government but too little administration, and we have too many laws and too little justice.

The author has dared to hope against hope and to dream and devise a pragmatic, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional strategy to redress these deficiencies and grievances by restructuring the system to provide effective governance, effective legislation and effective enforcement through structural methods, legislative measures and operational efforts like increasing transparency, clarity of functions and duties of a civil servant, accountability in administration, downsizing the administration to prevent duplication of work, computerization of routine work for increasing the efficacy and “velocity of governance,”  limiting the scope for discretion, reduction of procedures to the barest essentials, “a zero tolerance policy” on corruption, encouraging educational institutions to develop the character of youth, making “corruption-free service a Fundamental Right” to enable improvement of the quality of life with the passage of time,  passage of a Freedom of Information Act to enable people to know the laws and rules that are operated by the public servants, a Public Disclosures Act to encourage “whistle-blowing” by employees, a Corrupt Public Servants (Forfeiture of Property) Act to enable the confiscation of the proceeds of corruption and strengthening other laws relating to Income Tax to curb the menace of black money,  sanitizing the Election-related acts to effectively delink criminals from the political process, concerted action by the judiciary, the CVC, print and electronic media and NGOs to wage an unrelenting “war against corruption, which is the mother of all wars”.

In India everybody talks about corruption and does nothing about it, because nobody has the powers, time, patience or the resources to take on this ubiquitous menace. Nobody likes paying a bribe, but everybody pays. In India, great movements or momentous events, be it Parliamentary democracy, nationalization of industries of public importance or ensuring free and fair elections were initiated by great leaders. This war against corruption also requires effective and courageous leadership to establish certain norms and precedents, which no successor can hope to reverse or subvert. Winston Churchill, when praised for his indomitable courage in the Second World War said, “The English public was the indomitable Lion. I only had the honour to be called upon to roar.” Meanwhile, the public will read this book and await their deliverer.