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The average Indian may not be corrupt, but corruption is a much bigger problem in India than you acknowledge. If you look at http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/ you'll find that India is tied with Albania and Kiribati for being the 95th most corrupt country in the world. The United States is 24th. If you look at issues such as how big a deal caste, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc are, India looks like a much less enlightened country still. Being (presumably) a Hindu male of fairly high caste and normal sexual orientation, it is as easy for you to ignore this as it was, say, for a white southern gentleman in the USA 50 years ago to ignore the glaring problems there. That doesn't make them not real - it just makes it easy for you to not believe that they are real. Now for a random point of comparison. I grew up in Canada, which is in 10th place on the global corruption index. And yet my wife's family knew a girl who was raped and murdered, the murderer was caught, there was clear evidence, and yet he walked after bribing the right people. You would say this is impossible? An eyewitness saw him pick her up hitchhiking, and wrote down his license plate. She then picked the driver out of a police lineup. The suspect's semen was found in the murder victim. The medical report said that she was strangled, and cited physical evidence such as bruises on her neck. The judge ruled that the sex could have been consensual, and it was not impossible that she could have drowned in her own saliva. (She did have excess saliva, but not a tremendous amount. 16 year olds don't generally drown in their own saliva.) The bruising on her neck was ignored. The police then did not appeal. Nobody else had standing to sue, and double-jeopardy rules meant that he could never again be sued for her death. The case died there. This happened in a country that, evidence suggests, is substantially less corrupt than India. Why then would I be surprised that there can be egregious instances of corruption in India? |
However, I disagree with - "The average Indian may not be corrupt". We are corrupt beyond what we choose to acknowledge.
It depends on whether you call only the bribe taker as corrupt or both.
In my opinion you should consider both and that would mean that average Indian is corrupt. There is not an instance when you cannot get a simple task done without corruption.
Thankfully now, birth and death certificates in cities are partially digitized - and there is no 'need' to bribe and get it.
Consider this example, when I went to the corporation office to get the birth certificate of my son, another delighted father of a kid who was there for same reason was insisting that the clerk should take the Rs.100 out of his generosity and happiness of getting it so quickly!
Of course I wouldn't pay, but what do you think is the expectation from the clerk when he serves me next? Who is the corrupt person here?