Graft unlimited: Freezing of Maharashtra irrigation projects causes no tremors

Recently, the newly elected Maharashtra government froze several irrigation projects because of alleged and/or suspected graft. One assumed that this would cause tremors in the community of contractors, politicians and officials who may have been involved in them. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Water Resources Minister Girish Mahajan was quoted today in Pudhari, a Marathi newspaper, as saying that after he took over, contractors had approached him with a bribe offer of Rs 10 crore to get them back into business. When he refused, they upped the offer to Rs 100 crore. Mahajan said he had informed Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis about this approach.[caption id=“attachment_1548431” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Raman Kirpal/Firstpost[/caption] When the Anna Hazare-led Jan Lokpal agitation was at its peak, I recall calling an hotelier friend in a major district town in pre-split Andhra Pradesh. He had a wide social network and access to government babudom. Were the officials and politicians worried about the consequences of a new, stringent anti-graft law? This is what he had, inter alia, said. They were amused by the anti-corruption crusaders’ passion for the cause as the whole class which was prone to bribery – giving as well as taking – was already devising possible new ways of beating the new system that could be put in place. The principle was: laws are only as good as they are implemented. The common belief, and rightly so, is that corruption is rampant in India, having touched almost every aspect of life, from the moment a bribe is sought at the time of seeking a birth certificate, to the release of a death certificate, and virtually everything in between. Hence it becomes important that politicians realise that a mere denial does not make them or the institutions they run venality-free. In this context, the Shiv Sena’s demand - that the Anti-Corruption Bureau chief, Pravin Dixit, “must show proof to substantiate his claim” that apartments in Mumbai would be cheaper by Rs 500 per sq ft if corruption was rooted out in Mumbai’s civic body - is laughable. If he couldn’t, then he should be acted against. The civic body should instead prove that it was not corrupt. Earlier, news reports had quoted construction industry sources as saying that “bribe demands are mind-boggling: Rs 1,200 a sq ft in the island city , Rs 800 a sq ft between Bandra and Andheri, and up to Rs 600 a sq ft in the eastern suburbs”. Builders normally suffer in silence and pay out because delays increase the costs for them, even though they have the option of hiking or not discounting prices of the flats in their inventories. This is so almost across the country and, to an extent, bribery has taken the shape of profit sharing where officials allow irregularities and accept higher bribes. “The situation is such that recently a group of 25 top builders met to decide on approaching senior department officials to seek reasonable _(_emphasis added) bribe rates," the report said. That is, the chai-pani is no more just that. Not just in the civic body but everywhere else. A change of government with an announced determination to root out corruption does not deter them. A municipal corporator of a city in the neighbourhood of Mumbai was telling me that when some dangerously leaning trees had to be cut to save a building from likely damage, he was asked to pay Rs 40,000 per tree as graft. He was told, “Sir, you know how it is”. To retain his voter-support, the building residents had voted for him, he fell in line. In the mid-1980s, the practice in Gujarat was to inflate the cost of a project by some 10 percent, under-execute it by another 10 percent, and keep everyone happy without much detriment to the quality of the work. However, we see that roads are built in Mumbai by black-listed contractors at contracts for which they had bid peanuts. A recent letter to the Maharashtra government and also to the governor revealed that not only are bribes to be paid at several levels but project costs are inflated by as much as 500 percent even while sub-standard work is executed. That explains how the fat cats come to be and why the quality standards of public works – be it a road, a sidewalk, a hospital building, et al – are so abysmally poor. That also explains why politics has become a profession, not a facet of volunteerism for public purpose, and dynastic business. That explains why files go missing, as also why cronyism is a fact.