Make bribing legitimate

Mumbai: The research wing of State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest lender, in its latest report, has suggested the government to make the act of giving a bribe as a legitimate activity'.And it has given logic behind what it says. Even though the corruption act has been rightfully modified in 2018, some radical amendments can banish the idea of corruption altogether (was suggested in 2011 also), the report says.

"The central idea is that we should declare the act of giving a bribe as legitimate activity. In other words, the giver of a harassment bribe should have full immunity from any punitive action by the State. But the person, taking the bribe should be punished," says SBI's group chief economic advisor, Soumya Kanti Ghosh.

Thus, when a person gives a bribe, he/she will try to keep evidence of the act of bribery so that immediately after the bribery he/she can turn informer and get the bribe taker caught. The upshot of this is that the bribe taker will never take the bribe in the first place. In this way, we can actually achieve a Nash Equilibrium (commonly called in economic parlance) with an optimal payoff for the society. We can also find the idea of such Nash equilibrium in relation between Banks and Corporates post AQR, he added.

The other alternative is to penalise the bribe taker of more stringent action than the bribe giver and make a clear distinction between the motives!

The report released by TRACE (Nov-20), puts India is at 77th position in a global list that measures business bribery risks of 2020. It is quite impressive to note that over the years India's position in bribery risk ranking has improved significantly.

In 2014, India was ranked 185thposition out of 197 countries. We believe that India has made such an impressive progress primarily due to Government's mandate to remove corruption and bribery from all sections of society. In 2018, Government has amended the 'Prevention of Corruption Act-1988' after 30 years to introduce a number of new provisions, including criminalising the act of giving a bribe in addition to taking it, and at the same time putting in place an effective deterrence for such actions by individuals as well as corporate entities.

The trend in total number of actions taken by Central Vigilance Commissions (CVC) from 2008 to 2019 suggests that the number of complaints has declined since 2014 to only 32,579.

The number of punishments carried through own investigations by CVC is also declining. This clearly shows general public is having more faith in cleaner administration now as compared to earlier and hence outside complaints are declining. This also shows over the years, leveraging of technology and adoption of latest technological initiatives like e-tendering, e-pr curement and reverse auction has helped in bringing transparency in governance and this should be continued with gusto. The report's cross-country analysis between 2010 and 2018 shows that countries like India, UK, Egypt, Greece, Italy, etc. that succeeded in reducing the corruption level by improving their overall rank in corruption perception index (as published by Transparency International) has also achieved a positive GDP growth. India has stood tall among rest of the developing countries by improving its overall rank from 94 in 2012 to 78 in 2018.