Corruption 3: Corruption and Conditional clause.

07 AUGUST 2023

In English language conditional sentences consist of a main clause and a conditional clause. The conditional clause usually begins with if or unless and can come before or after the main clause.

The conditional clause is to express that the action in the main clause (without if) can only take place if a certain condition (the clause with if) is fulfilled. Any conditions attached to the action in the main clause falls in the same category.

I have recently discovered that the root cause of corruption in India is not anything in the inherent nature of people here in India, as corruption is omnipresent, but it is in the conditional clause of the English or other languages incorporated inmany rules in this country. Take any rule in any aspect of life in this country. Did you notice the conditional clauses far outnumber the main clause in any rule?

As an administrator, the moment you are inserting a conditional clause in a rule, you are doing a great service to yourself and to people below and above you in the chain of command: you are opening out a new channel of income for all of them that cannot equal any other action by you as administrator, such as making it easier for people to start an industry or a shop or creating job opportunities for them. Even if the job to be done is not as big as any of these like starting an industry, it may be for a daily living like driving license, registering a vehicle or ownership transfer of a vehicle, ration card, selling or buying of real estate and the like. More importantly, even if the conditional clause does not affect directly any of these, at least you can make the hapless citizen lose his most precious resource namely time, by making him wait for long or by asking him to come for at least 3 times to get even a minor job done, just by citing a conditional clause. And those who cannot afford to lose their most valuable resource namely time, suggest to them how they can save a lot of their time if only they pay a small ‘fee’ in cash.

It works like this: A conditional clause is indeed a means by which you can tell the hapless citizen that, because of that clause the job he has to get done by the Govt. cannot be done- interestingly whether the clause is relevant or not for the job the citizen wants to get done. It creates an opportunity to exploit the citizen by fooling him what amount of work the authorizer must do to get his job done despite this terrible conditional clause. If linking this conditional clause is not possible, you innovatively create a link that leads this conditional clause to something totally outside of and irrelevant to the job you as a citizen want to get done. For example, RTO asks for a certificate from the financial institution that financed you for your 7-year-old car that you want to sell, even though you have cleared the instalments in 3 years as per agreement. Why is RTO interested in this as this is purely a matter between the buyer and seller? Is RTO the authorized agency to ensure that all people who take loan return it without fail?

Let me now give an example to make this write-up less abstract: You want to take a driving license. You go thru carefully all that you must do, specifically all the documents you need to carry and meet the inspector at RTO in the month of Nov. 2018. The inspector goes through your documents and says you must produce the rent agreement. You say that you have the ration card, Aadhar card, electricity bill and passbook all indicating the address. You explain to him as you are staying in a rental accommodation and as the agreement has ended in Oct. 2018 and as you are vacating the premises in Jan. 2019, there is no agreement covering the period of Nov. 2018. But the inspector insists that the rent agreement is necessary! And the four key documents you have given will not do.

This means you must visit your owner who says no agreement for 2- or 3-months rental and the inspector who says it is necessary to have the rental agreement. You must take leave for a couple of days from your office losing the days from your leave account.

And the whole thing is settled without the rent agreement on payment of ‘fees’ of Rs. 2000.

You can observe the following present in the above example:

The conditional clause here has created the opportunity for additional revenue for all in the chain of command. The conditional clause made you waste 2 or 3 days of your most precious resource namely time and the next most precious resource namely your hard-earned money.

From this anatomy of corruption that we have described we can arrive at workable solutions to reduce corruption significantly. …….to be continued.

From the very few indices without brackets in the minus column, the conclusions under 11.2 are right.

From the number of indices with brackets under minus it is also clear that a significant number of expert opinions went wrong.