Fighting Corruption

State Government has ordered the pre-mature retirement of the thirteen officials for being directly involved in corruption. The action has been taken on the recommendations of a high level Standing Committee headed by the Chief Secretary Madhav Lal which is looking into the corruption in the administration. The move comes amidst the high-profile political drama surrounding the former education minister Peerzada Muhammad Sayeed whose resignation over the copying of his son in board examination was turned down by the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

Even while the decision to ease out the corrupt officials is welcome, one cannot miss the irony of the move: a politician with a long baggage of corruption finds himself sitting smug in the ministerial chair. In comparison, we have thirteen officials – majority of them expectedly from the engineering department - being forced to retire pre-maturely. The irony is only deepened with one of the employees being a lineman. Anyway, the attempt here is not to belittle the government move. It can certainly serve as a deterrent for the corrupt employees. But only to a point. For, the measures like these are not traditionally uniform.  It is mostly the lower-rung employees that face the stick while the sharks, more often than not, go scot-free. And there is a whole track-record to prove this. Any assembly document on corruption or for that matter the cases pending with the state's investigating agencies will reveal that bureaucratic and political corruption is rife in the state. Some major cases of corruption, running in crores of rupees are pending with Accountability Commission. During Ghulam Nabi Azad's term as Chief Minister, a Vigilance led massive drive against bureaucratic malfeasance had netted a rich harvest of the middle rung to senior officers ''with wealth disproportionate to their known sources of income''. But barring a few, against whom action followed - primarily for political reasons - most of them are now rehabilitated in their jobs. Pre-mature retirement certainly can be one of the tools against corruption, but it is at best an adhocist measure used selectively, once or twice in a long time. The basic problem is that corruption in our state is structural in nature, inbuilt in the way our political culture has evolved over the years. This means even those who otherwise would want to be clean feel persuaded to act otherwise. And fighting this structure needs us to go much beyond the forcible retiring of the minor officials.

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