Considering India today, corruption is arguably one of the hottest topic around and every second news involves Kalmadi fiasco, 2g spectrum jhol or the Lokpal issue. Moreover the common man feels strongly about it and goes about cursing the politician involved without considering the number of people he himself bribed. The current situations would make one ponder over the root cause of such high levels of corruption. Is it the huge amount of money involved or is it just our nature? The most common example can be witnessed on any busy red light of our country: whenever a cop catches an offender, the two more often than not come to a “mutual” agreement. So is it safe to say that right from an early stage all of us have been exposed to some sort of corruption and hence are some what comfortable with it? Have we developed the regular “chalta hai” attitude to this issue ?
Here, we can say that as long as the two parties involved don’t cause any harm to any other person , corruption may be tolerated (although may be noted that even this level of corruption must be avoided as much as possible). However if the actions of the involved parties are harmful to the society their actions need to be stopped. For eg: In the CWG scam it was the “aam aadmi” who suffered as it was his tax, which was supposed to be used for the welfare of the country but went into someone’s Swiss bank account.
From the various examples it can be noted that many times corruption takes place when there is a need to get something which can’t be obtained legally, like avoiding a visit to jail or the lure for lump sum money. So one of the ways to get rid of it is to make some of these thing legal. However, such a solution is rather troublesome and unpractical to be implemented. Now to search for the solution of the problem we need to eradicate the root cause of it which in this case may be our attitude towards corruption.
To overcome it, we can infuse moral values in students so that malpractices are discouraged by a person on moral ground. Here one needs to emphasize that a person who is morally sound won’t indulge in malpractices even if he is offered crores of rupees.
In the end we can say that corruption is a very complex syndrome involving various socio-economic factors, but with our efforts like the Lokpal bill, our county can be cured of it.
