Graft costing India 1.5% of GDP growth each year

Corruption, especially in high places, is eating up India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth by at least 1.5% each year. This figure has been calculated in an internal report of the Planning Commission. Chetan Chauhan reports. Scandinavian solution

Updated on: Nov 20, 2011, 02:07:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Corruption, especially in high places, is eating up India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth by at least 1.5% each year. This figure has been calculated in an internal report of the Planning Commission and points to similar concerns voiced by top business leaders of the country in the recent past.

"If we could have reduced corruption, we could have clocked GDP growth of anywhere between 8.5% and 10%," Infosys chairman emeritus NR Narayana Murthy had said, supporting Anna Hazare’s campaign.

Azim Premji, chairman of IT major Wipro, had said the same thing earlier this week. "If corruption levels in India were reduced to that in the Scandinavian countries, investment rate will increase annually by some 12 percentage points and GDP growth by almost 1.5% each year," the plan panel’s report said.

India’s Corruption Perception Index in 2009 was 3.4 whereas that of the Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Norway and Sweden — was 9.03. Even if India improves its corruption perception by 2.38 points, GDP growth will improve by 0.5 %.

That is achievable with countries such as North Korea, Cyprus and Zimbabwe improving their corruption index among 213 economies reported by Transparency International, the report said.

The study, done under former cabinet secretary BK Chaturvedi, now a panel member, has recommended deletion of article 311 of the Constitution, which provides protection to civil servants against dismissal.

It also wants ombudsmen at local levels for quick action against corrupt officials and special courts to decide cases of corruption within six months.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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