India’s daily billions

Admiral Fasih Bokhari, former CNS, Pakistan Navy, and Chairman of the country’s National Accountability Board, is set to release a report December 14 that’s expected to reveal that Rs 6-7 BILLION rupees are DAILY lost in corruption — bribes, payoffs, commissions, etc. Supposedly astounded by this figure the Pak cabinet lost no time in rejecting the report. That’s not however going to make reality go away.

Now do the arithmetic: If India’s economy is eight times as large as Pakistan’s, and our politicians, bureaucrats and every agent of government –from the beat constable to the water-metre wallah – right up to cabinet ministers, and political party heads are no less larcenous, venal, corrupt, and having a hand in your pocket rifling for change, a simple extrapolation would mean Rs. 48-56 BILLION being lost to the economy EVERY DAY! (the fact that the Pakistani rupee is roughly only half as strong as its Indian counterpart is of little account in indicating the scale of corruption.) It is the result of the minders of the state turning predators. The people of South Asia need the greatest good luck to survive the systems of misgovernance they have created!

About Bharat Karnad

Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, he was Member of the (1st) National Security Advisory Board and the Nuclear Doctrine-drafting Group, and author, among other books of, 'Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy', 'India's Nuclear Policy' and most recently, 'Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)'. Educated at the University of California (undergrad and grad), he was Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies, and Henry L. Stimson Center, Washington, DC.

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