Why not have citizen committees at various levels?
Every single day passes by and it is business as usual for the ruling party at the Center and the ones that rules the various States of India. The rulers play all sorts of games to stay in power, become corrupt by looting public money at every given opportunity, and go all out to silence the opposition by any means, fair and foul.
However, the common man, in most cases has some comic relief, thanks to the jokes dished out by the politicians at some point in time. But nothing more.
How can we ensure that every pie spent out of public money is properly used, and accounted for?
The answer may be in Citizen Committees, formed with highly experienced but just retired Judges, bankers, lawyers, journalists and Chartered Accountants who run highly reputed firms on their own. These Committees should have access to Government records and every work done by, say, the Pubic Works Department, should be subject to audit by this Committee, and report thereof should go straight to the Chief Vigilance Commissioner.
The laws should be suitably amended and put in place to statutorily form such Committees, and if any one members dies, the other members should be empowered to appoint another public figure, well known for his or her personal integrity and values. Everything should be transparent and should be through an open tender process.
At the moment, there is every chance for massive corruption, as the ruling party has all the powers to grant projects or choose their own contractors at will. Obviously, stories of 40 to 45% of money, that is, out of the total project cost, being paid as black money, in Tamil Nadu, are all available, and there is a big demand for action against corrupt officials.
However, as can only be expected, the ruling party will do everything possible to simply hide every single fact pertaining to corruption and get the whole public forget everything by doing something dramatic to distract public attention.
What is urgently needed is the direct role and action of some very senior public figures, who can stem the rot. The likes of Mr Vittal, the former Chief Vigilance Commissioner, or Mr Vaghul, the former banker with a superb record of performance, should step in. Through various media, the general public should highlight the importance of these committees, and should ensure that suitable laws are framed in this regard.
Similarly, the Citizen Committees should have the powers to summon the sitting MLA or MP and ensure that he or she actually listens to the grievances of people, at least once in a month, and gets the same rectified through decisive action. Unless this is done, nothing much can be done to ensure accountability.
These days, the trend of investigative journalism has declined. The stories of looting of public money rarely, if ever, appear in the press or get exposed through the electronic media. The Citizen Committees should be empowered to bring to light such acts of corruption or omission, so that the public will come to know who is corrupt and to what extent.
The war against corruption cannot happen just by cornering those who are corrupt. We should actually be blamed for our sins. We should simply, refuse go give money. This can happen only if every single person, or a huge majority, decide to not give money for anything.
Let us take a typical example -- the engineering college scenario in Tamil Nadu. There is a counseling process, and the students who score even just sixty five percent marks in the plus examination can easily secure an admission to a "B" grade college, in some big city, including Coimbatore or Salem. However, once the results are out, the parents of such children, take suit cases of money, often running into five or six lakhs and go the top twenty colleges, where every seat is sold for a minimum of five lakh rupees, under the "Management" quota.
The reason is that only the top twenty colleges have some good placement record. What is not understood is that the best of the "B" grade colleges also have good placement. So, if the boy or girl, studies well, and comes within the first few ranks in the college or even the University, he or she stands a good chance of landing in a good job.
So, there is a giver -- in fact, thousands of them, and corruption goes on. We need to ensure that the menace of "Management" quota is used judiciously to help the poor but bright students and not merely the rich students.
The Citizen Committees should be empowered to actually fix the quota of such "Management Seats" that should go to poor but bright students. These students would have scored eighty per cent marks but go down to some "C" grade college, just because the top ranks in the best colleges and the caste quota in the "B" colleges would mean that all the seats are just beyond their reach.
So, at every level, there is a massive scope for corruption. We also need to note that such Citizen Committees, made or retired Public Servants or famous personalities from the private sector, should be honorary. Would Mr. Azim Premji of Wipro or Mr Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies, not care to be present in such Committees? They will gladly render their services for free.
We really need to think out of the box to ensure more accountability at any cost. Unless we do this, we cannot remove corruption, even to a limited extent.
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