Letters: Greed, not need

Veenu Sandhu and T E Narasimhan's aptly-captioned report "Kickback nation" (Weekend, June 9) illustrates how the unholy nexus between the politicians, bureaucrats and businesspersons has spread its tentacles far and wide. The reasons? Much is made of the need for taking bribe due to poor salary of public servants. In fact, it is the greed for money. Otherwise, how do we explain why a bus conductor in state transport service owns a fleet of buses funded by ill-gotten money and still continues to shortchange the state, and why well-paid high-ranking bureaucrats are found with Rs 100-plus crore wealth when raided? A steep decline in societal values that now adores the corrupt is another cause. In the pre- and post-Independent India, the bribe-takers were treated like an outcast and earned a grudging respect from the affected wrongdoers. Premchand's well-known story Namak ka Daroga captures the mood of the nation then. Now kickback beneficiaries (like Lalu Prasad Yadav) are re-elected and invited by IIMs to guide young minds! Instead of respect, the honest are ridiculed and even killed. Ultimately, it is the character, neither environment nor the genes, that makes a person to beat every law to find ways to receive sweeteners - sad that our education system fails to emphasise and imbibe prime values strongly. The result is a system that breeds dishonest people like this employee of folklore: on receiving complaints about his cunningness in taking bribes in every job he was assigned, the king transferred him to the river bank to count waves throughout the day and report compliance. Even here, he started taking bribes from the boatmen and other users of river saying they were disturbing his duty of counting waves correctly.

Y G Chouksey, Pune

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