India's minor rise in corruption index must be welcomed but there is a long way yet to go

The most significant thing about India’s rise — by three ranks — to the 78th position in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index is the fact that the country has jumped past its bigger Eastern neighbour, China. In fact, the Middle Kingdom has dropped dramatically in the corruption rankings. Predictably, the communist media will dismiss the report but the fact is that under President Xi Jinping, who made fighting corruption a supposed cornerstone of his administration, the unscrupulous boomed thanks to projects like the Belt and Road Initiative. Corruption in China was just a stick used by Xi to eliminate his political rivals. However, India’s slight rise overtaking China is also a sign that under the Narendra Modi dispensation, there has been a palpable sense that large-scale political corruption reduced. This is not to say that every estate of the Indian state, including the fourth estate, the media, is riddled with scams. But as they say, we must take baby steps to start with.

India’s problem is not just of corruption across the executive but that the malaise has taken root in society much like an invasive plant species and it is extremely difficult to remove it. The current state of Indian banks because of their profligate lending habits was in no small part due to questionable understanding between parties. Besides one has to understand that corruption is not always a case of money changing hands, it is also that network of favours. A job for a relative, school admission for a child, the worst forms of a corrupt system rarely involve money. Removing that will take years of work and a mindset change that everything, from chai-pani as the telephone lineman once asked for just to do his job to the payoffs for contracts, is wrong and that means teaching children at a very young age that corruption is bad. But in a country with an economic disparity as wide as that in India, eliminating corruption is almost impossible. That does not mean that we should not do our utmost to try and reduce it. There is little authentic economic data to prove this but rough calculations made by anti-corruption watchdogs show that we lose a percentage point or more of growth every year thanks to graft cases. Because it almost always benefits a few at the cost of the many. The poor municipal roads and potholes courtesy the a contractor ‘mafia’ in many cities are evidence of this. So yes, while we should be pleased with our rise and have a bit of schadenfreude about China's decline, we should not lose sight of the fact that the road ahead to reducing corruption is a long and a hard one.