India's recent arms bribery scandal, which is bedevilling the federal coalition government, having paralysed parliament for weeks, is part of a larger malaise afflicting the country.
Journalists posing as arms dealers filmed senior military and defence officials and politicians accepting bribes to sell their non-existent product. The documentary, shown last month, led to the resignation of senior politicians, and an army court of inquiry is investigating one and two-star generals for accepting bribes.
"Corruption is an accepted part of daily life in India", Dr Wilima Wadhwa, an economist with the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi, said. "It's something all Indians learn to live with," she added.
A former prime minister, Mr Inder Kumar Gujral, echoed this when he publicly declared that corruption had permeated every aspect of Indian life and that the state was helpless in countering it. One of his predecessors, Mr Narasimha Rao, was recently found guilty of bribery, but his sentence was suspended.
A "national bribe index" conducted recently by the weekly magazine Outlook revealed that bribes had to be paid for birth certificates, admission to schools and universities and even to get bank loans.
They also had to be paid for passports, ration cards, driving licences, electricity, water and telephone connections and for housing plans to be cleared.
Even police had to be bribed by courting couples to prevent harassment.
A Federal Home Ministry report compiled by senior officials, including the heads of India's internal and external security agencies, declared that corruption across India was "endemic".
It said crime syndicates had corrupted India's state machinery at all levels, virtually running a parallel government. "All across India crime syndicates have become a law unto themselves, making rules and ensuring that everyone obeys," the report said.
In a drive to control graft among civil servants, Indian customs officials posted at airports now have to "declare" the amount of cash they carry to work each day.
In line with the "cash-and-sign" order enforced recently, this amount is entered in a register and later tallied with money with which all customs officials, irrespective of rank, leave the airport at the end of their shift.
Customs officials met the new directive introduced by the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), India's national corruption watchdog committee, with antagonism by going on strike nearly a fortnight after huge amounts of cash were recovered from some of them at Delhi's international airport.
They returned to work only after charges were dropped against the corrupt officials, who claimed the wads of currency recovered were for daily expenditure on tea and cigarettes. Customs officials had resisted the installation of closed-circuit television cameras to monitor payment of bribes by covering them with chewing gum and their uniform caps.
"To survive in India today an individual either has to have influence or money or both", a senior government official admitted.
Having neither meant trouble and a wretched existence, he declared.