History made in India: Govt agrees to anti-corruption bill

More of Pseudo-Gandhian deeds of Anna Hazare. http://www.punemirror.in/article/2/2010101220101012233239336...

For a country full of software engineers and business process engineers, India's pathetic bureaucracy has not been in any mood to modernize. Most modernization efforts have been to buy a couple of PCs load up Windows and wait for magic to somehow happen. It has not.

Open accounting, transparent gvernance etc were supposed to have happened by now, they haven't. The bureaucracy is also extremely dismissive of anything industry suggests as a better way of doing things. Anything that devolves their ability to sit on approvals or wield power is shot down immediately. The existing bureaucracy is a waste of tax payer money and an example of redundant waste.

Even Slovenia now has bench-marked, transparent and open accounting systems.

I think this forum perhaps would understand best what is the real cause of corruption in India. In a place like Singapore an entrepreneur need to take around 7 permission to start construction, in India you need to take 30+. Is the way to reduce corruption is to bring a new inspector who will looks after all those 30+ permission processes or to reduce these permission to 5 ?

Indian government employes 3 million employees out of which 1.4 million are employed purely by railways. Does it make sense for the Ombudman to appoint 7000 inspectors to look after Indian Railways corruption or Should the railways try to thin its staff by outsourcing most of it's processes?

Does it make sense to waster tax-payer's money on an ombudsman inspector to look after corruption in a loss making government factory that manufactures soap ? (Yes, in India government runs soap companies). Or should it get rid of that factory itself ?

If you want to start a hotel you need to take around 300 permissions our of which most needs to be renewed yearly. One permission for example is from the 'weights and measurements' department which certifies that all the weighing scales in your hotel are up-to the standards. No one bothers to get their scales checked they just send a packet of money to 'weights and measures' department and get permissions.

The root cause of corruption in India is not in lack of some laws but the policies which government has put in deliberately to ensure that politicians are in position to control every aspect of it's people's life.

In software terms I would say Indian government is a case of bad architectural layout. You have a zillion components tightly coupled with another zillion components which are affecting performance of the system. If someone wants to be efficient he has to hack the system. Adding another layer over this bad architecture does not solve any porblem, you need to fix the basic architecture first. Then talk about ombudsman.

Exactly. Why is it that the smaller national highways and a few of the biggest airports only got nationalized recently (i.e., the past 2 years)? It's most likely that that the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi temporarily broke the spell of apathetic stupor. (or perhaps this only applies to South India, in which case that would be sad yet telling, since South India is the home to most of India's IT sector.)

India's high population and smaller landmass (--> higher pop dens) requires innovative, planned, coordinated strategies to conserve resources. To say that India is a democracy does not mean that it is a meritocracy. It still seems to be more like a feudal-like hierarchy inherited from the British, which itself was usurped and adapted from the feudal monarchies before. Most post-colonial states wrestle with issues of being too top-down, despotic, nepotistic.

Laws are only really worth anything if they can be adjudicated and enforced. What good is a law that no one respects? Everything is all about institutions and what they do, so celebrating a law might be premature since it's only 1/3 of the entire end goal -- you need the judiciary and the executive on the same page and working, too.

For those of us who are not aware of lokpal or what the bill contains to reduce corruption in India, can someone provide a brief summary?