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Live & bribe, no other way in India: Survey
It is very hard to go through life in India without paying a bribe, more than two-thirds of young, tax-paying Indians believe. HT reports.
It is very hard to go through life in India without paying a bribe, more than two-thirds of young, tax-paying Indians believe.
More than half of an HT-C Fore survey’s respondents between the age of 18 and 30 said that they had been asked for a bribe at some point, while nearly three-fourths had faced delays, harassment or other kinds of trouble from public officials or politicians because they didn’t give them a bribe that was implicitly expected.
The survey was conducted on April 13 and 15 in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore.
The respondents ranked politicians as the most corrupt in the country, followed by the police and then the bureaucrats. Businessmen and common citizens followed.
“We are allowing the system to be corrupt,” said Shoeb Shaikh, 26, a Mumbai-based technology specialist in a finance company, who said he had to pay a bribe to the police to get his passport. “But if I want to fight, who will support me? I can’t fight alone, can I?”
Reflecting the spontaneous upsurge of support from the middle-class for Anna Hazare’s hunger strike earlier this month to demand a strong Jan Lokpal bill, more than 80% of respondents felt setting up such a body would help reduce corruption in government, with only a minority believing it could become yet another bureaucracy without accountability.
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