INDIA:MILLIONS OF Indians living below the poverty line, earning €1 or less a day, paid an estimated €140 million in bribes over a three-month period recently to avail of basic public services, a study revealed at the weekend.
In its survey conducted between November 2007 and January 2008, Transparency International India found that 8.83 billion rupees had been paid as bribes by the country's poor for 11 types of services, including police, healthcare, revenue and education.
Some 300 million of India's one billion people live below the poverty line.
The survey discovered that the police were most corrupt. Petty officials involved in maintaining land records occupied the second spot in the list of bribe-takers.
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, launched by prime minister Manmohan Singh's administration soon after it assumed office in 2004, was also plagued by corruption.
Almost four million below-poverty-line households had to bribe hospital staff to be admitted, allotted a bed and, if required, referred to diagnostic services. The total amount of bribes paid to hospital staff was estimated to be 870 million rupees (€13 million).
Nearly one million households were denied hospital services because they either refused to pay bribes or could not afford to do so.
Though primary and secondary education up to class 12 was the least corrupt area, it was found that poor households had paid 120 million rupees in bribes to admit their children into school.
"The level and extent of misgovernance is horrifying in legal and moral terms," India's vice-president Hamid Ansari said while releasing the report on Saturday in New Delhi. Corruption, he added, was "pervasive and cancerous".
"This kind of corruption that denies people their entitlement to basic and need-based services, many of which may be free by law, results in the poor finding themselves at the losing end," TII chairman Admiral (retired) R H Tahiliani said. It only increases disparity in income and deepens poverty, he said.
The study also revealed that more than five million below-poverty-line families had to dole out bribes or use a contact to avail of the public distribution service that provides them rice, wheat and cooking fuel at subsidised rates.
Transparency International India is the local arm of the Berlin-based watchdog group that releases an annual ranking of perceived corruption in countries globally.
India ranked 72nd out of 163 in the 2007 index.