Corruption in India: ‘All your life you pay for things that should be free’
August 19, 2011 No Comment
As Anna Hazare leaves prison to continue his protest, residents in Delhi explain how bribery forms part of everyday life Vishal is an ordinary man with an ordinary story of corruption in India. He lives in east Delhi, part of the traffic-choked sprawl of India’s capital. He owns a fried chicken takeaway similar to thousands of others that have sprung up in recent years to serve the new tastes of the burgeoning middle class. And he faces an ordinary Indian daily routine of petty corruption. The number of people Vishal has to pay off is bewildering. There are the local beat constables who take free lunches, and the more senior police officers who can cause problems with opening hours. They take 10,000 rupees (£130) on the 10th of each month to allow Vishal to stay open late. Then there are the officials from various local authorities who also receive regular payments – around £50 per month – to ensure that health, safety and hygiene inspections go smoothly. “Of the 40,000 rupees (£520) I earn a month from my restaurant, I pay at least a third in bribes,” Vishal, 26, said. But bribery also extends into his personal life. Vishal has two young children and to get the eldest in to the best local school he paid a “donation” of 25,000 rupees (£3,400) in cash to the headmaster. A driving licence needed another bribe. Getting an appointment with a competent public doctor cost a substantial amount. And then there are the traffic police. Every other week Vishal says he is stopped, told he has committed an offence and made to pay 100 rupees (£1.25), the standard fee to avoid “too much bother”. “I am so disappointed [about] everything you have to pay,” he said. “And no one does anything. The politicians won’t do anything because they are all corrupt too.” Such sentiments are widespread in India and explain the sudden outpouring of anger over recent days as tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest about the arrest of anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare. Though a string of major corruption scandals such as the telecoms licence scam that cost the country up to £26bn, and the alleged fraud surrounding the high-profile Commonwealth Games in Delhi, has fuelled some of the fury, it is the grinding daily routine of petty corruption that is at the root. “You pay for a birth certificate, a death certificate,” said Varun Mishra, a 30-year-old software engineer and one of thousands who marched in Delhi to support Hazare. “All your life you pay. And for what? For things that should be free.” Hazare, 74, has harnessed this grassroots frustration to launch a popular movement. Having been jailed as a threat to public order, he went on hunger strike and refused to leave prison when released. He has finally left jail, having been granted permission to hold a 15-day fast in a public park. His public relations team has run rings around clumsy and slow official spokesmen. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has an impeccable reputation for personal probity but has looked distant and out of touch. Hazare is campaigning for a powerful new anti-corruption ombudsman with the right to investigate senior politicians, officials and judges. His critics say this would be undemocratic, and worry about the division of powers. But for people like restaurateur Vishal, Hazare is a hero. “At least he is doing something,” he said. “No one else is.” Though bribery, or “graft”, is a fact of life for more or less everybody in India, the demonstrators are largely urban, educated and relatively well-off. “What you are seeing on the street is a middle-class rebellion,” said Mohan Guruswamy, a former senior official in the ministry of finance and founder of the Centre for Policy Alternatives thinktank. There are reports in local media that call centres and other back office operations in IT hubs such as Gurgaon, a satellite town of Delhi, and Bengaluru, the southern city, have faced staffing problems with up to half of workers joining the protests. Teachers, lawyers and medical professionals have also featured prominently. Support for Hazare is particularly strong among those who have benefited most from India’s recent breakneck economic development but are frustrated by a largely unreformed public sector that delivers poor and haphazard services. They are often the young. Many of those who waited outside Tihar jail in Delhi to greet Hazare on his triumphant exit were in their teens or even younger. One 12-year-old carried a placard saying “save my future”. Tens of millions of school and college-leavers pour into the Indian jobs market each year. State institutions have not kept pace with aspirations raised by years of rapid economic growth and with skill levels low and good jobs scare, unrest could rise. Senior Congress party politicians this week argued that some level of graft was “inevitable” in a developing economy. However, analysts said the extent of the problem in India – which ranks at 87 out of 178 on the campaign group Transparency International’s index of corruption – is unique. “India is comparable to China, doing better than Russia, less well than Brazil,” said Robin Hodess, the group’s research director. “But bureaucratic and petty corruption is extreme in India.” Some say India’s generally patchy law enforcement is to blame. “We are politically advanced in terms of institutions,” said Guruswamy. “We have courts, a parliament and a long tradition of democracy … but very few people are ever held to account.” Last week a senior judge faced unprecedented impeachment proceedings 25 years after the alleged offence. Others say those who pay the bribes are to blame too. One supreme court lawyer who refused demands for commissions in return for sanctioning payment for work he had done for the government, said giving in to corruption could be down to “deep powerlessness” or simply a “I just want to get on with my day” type of attitude. “As Indians we see corruption as something that permeates our lives, like air pollution, but we need to think much more carefully about it,” he said. Raghu Thoniparambil, who runs the website ipaidabribe.com, pointed out that corruption in the private sector was just as prevalent. “All these protests are very inspiring but will people really change? I don’t know,” he said. Less ambitious and spectacular measures could have more impact than the ombudsman office Hazare and his followers want to create, Thoniparambil argues. As well as perceptions of general corruption, Transparency International also compiles an index of nations where bribes are paid most frequently, particularly in business. India ranks 19 out of 22, above Mexico, Russia and China. Manu Joseph, editor of the news magazine Open, speaks of “hypocrisy”. “The Indian relationship with corruption is very complex and politicians are representative of society as a whole,” he said. But the widespread anger is also due to a sense that modern India not only deserves better but needs to at least moderate rampant corruption to compete on the world stage. The most high profile cases have already damaged the nation’s image sufficiently to slow economic growth. One text message circulating in India last week focused on the huge sums of “black money” illegally stashed by wealthy Indians in overseas assets and bank accounts. The return of these funds could pay for “Oxford-like universities”, borders stronger than “the China wall” and roads “like in Paris”, it said. “We want a great country, stronger than the US, UK and Australia,” said 18-year-old Sushil Kumar as he waited for the protest march from Hazare’s jail to start. “India will be great, with its traditions, its culture. But we have to beat corruption.” The anti-bribery website Launched last October, ipaidabribe.com is the brainchild of Raghunandan Thoniparambil, a retired official from the elite Indian Administrative Service. By Friday 12,076 people had posted their personal stories of graft for all to see. They included businessmen forced to pay 50 rupees (70p) to traffic police, 300 rupees (£3.20) paid for a passport verification, 40,000 rupees (£540) handed over to have property registered, 5,000 rupees (£67) for a birth certificate and travellers who had to give 100 rupees (£1.30) to get berths on otherwise full express trains. Software takes names off the site. “The aim is not to identify people but to identify the problem,” Thoniparambil said. In June, after a BBC report about ipaidabribe.com several similar sites opened in China. Within two weeks they were shut down. “In India we are sometimes a little slow or dysfunctional but civil society, simple democracy can make a huge difference,” added Thoniparambil. India Anna Hazare Jason Burke guardian.co.uk
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At least 12 killed amid invasion of base used for education and helping Afghanistan’s civil society groups With its fortified double set of walls, “airlock” entry system and expensive guards hired from the ranks of retired Gurkhas, the occupants of the British Council compound in Kabul could be forgiven for feeling at times more like prisoners than teachers and cultural ambassadors. The compound, which in happier times hosted top diplomats and Afghan government ministers for the Queen’s official birthday party, typifies how the rise and rise of the Taliban-led insurgency has forced foreign officials to effectively cut themselves off from the country they work in. At daybreak on Friday these multi-million pound precautions were not enough to stop the war crashing right into the heart of an organisation which, after years of having a low profile in Afghanistan, had recently received additional funds to greatly expand its work on education, cultural exchanges and helping Afghan civil society groups. At 5.40am two vehicles laden with explosives and detonating in quick succession made short work of the walls and booms that are meant to keep the outside world away. A handful of heavily-armed suicide attackers then came running from nearby side streets, shouting and firing into the air. Even before they had got into the compound through the now wrecked front gate the assault had claimed several lives. “The explosions destroyed my windows and threw me against the wall,” said Shah Agha, whose house overlooks the British Council. “When the dust cleared I could see dead municipality workers on the ground and the body of a policeman without a head.” Details of exactly what happened inside the compound have not yet emerged, but the sound of gunfire and explosions suggested the militants followed the gory new pattern of such attacks: they moved methodically around and tried to kill everyone they found, engaging in fire fights with the team employed by G4S, the British private security company. As the Gurkhas and Afghans fought back, the two female British Council teachers, one a UK citizen, the other South African, were rushed to a “safe room” by a British G4S bodyguard. The room is essentially a windowless bunker sealed with a massive metal door, designed to withstand any attack for enough time for outside help to arrive. On the other side of town, at the British embassy, the ambassador and senior staff scrambled to a control room where they monitored the situation as it unfolded. A communication link allowed the ambassador, William Patey, to remain in constant touch with the British Council staff hiding in the safe room. Speaking after they had been safely “extracted” and taken to the British Embassy, he said they were “obviously shaken but well, uninjured”. The Afghan commando unit charged with responding to such incidents has gained considerable experience dealing with the sort of exceptionally difficult situations that would tax the world’s best Swat teams. In June they were involved in a battle to regain control of the hilltop Intercontinental Hotel which was assaulted in similar fashion by a squad of suicide fighters. But despite being among the best trained members of Afghanistan’s security forces it appeared they remain heavily reliant on their foreign mentors, members of New Zealand’s Special Air Service. With so many soldiers on the ground, including British troops who manned a cordon, the relatively upmarket west Kabul neighbourhood that is home to leading members of the Afghan establishment, including one of the vice-presidents, soon resembled a war zone in southern Afghanistan. Amid sporadic bursts of gunfire and explosions, low-flying Apache helicopters circled above, occasionally firing off flares – an automatic counter-measure against surface to air missiles. Some journalists wore flak jackets and Kevlar helmets to report from the streets of the relatively secure Afghan capital, while the tell tale “whizzing” noise indicates bullets are passing nearby at one point sent reporters piling into drainage ditches for cover. At midday a pair of Blackhawk helicopters picked up a seriously wounded soldier to take him to a Nato trauma hospital. The New Zealand Defence Force later confirmed that an SAS member had died en route to hospital after being shot in the chest, the first death the regiment has suffered in Afghanistan. Nine people were killed in the fighting and 22 injured. G4S said three of its Afghan employees were also killed, while three Gurkhas and three Afghans were injured. Considering the length of the fighting, many feared a bigger death toll. The Taliban’s public relations team was quick to exploit the attack, grossly inflating the number killed to 40 foreigners and Afghan police, as is their habit. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman reached by phone, said it was a symbolic act timed to coincide with the annual celebration of the day in 1919 when Afghanistan won the right to run a foreign policy independent of Britain. “We attacked the buildings because we want to remind the British that we won our independence from them before and we will do it again,” he said. Even as fighting raged at a compound a few hundred metres from the once grand campus that used to house the British embassy in the heyday of empire, over at the presidential palace Hamid Karzai and senior Afghans and foreign diplomats marked the anniversary with a small ceremony. It was not until 2pm that the British ambassador declared the operation to retake control of the British Council was over and every insurgent killed. But bursts of automatic gunfire could still be heard from inside the compound nine hours after the siege began, although the shots were almost certainly not due to firefights with insurgents. On the street outside soldiers, including a member of Britain’s special forces with his face hidden a scarf, angrily tried to get journalists to move away. Shortly afterwards Afghan officials invited the media forward to photograph the grisly remains of one of the attackers which they laid out for the scrum of reporters. For good measure one of the policemen spat on the corpse. Afghanistan Taliban Global terrorism Jon Boone guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Despite their president’s claim that military operations are over , Syrian security forces fired at protesters last night, killing two alongside a rash of arrests. The attacks came hours after Barack Obama called for President Bashar Assad to step down, the AP reports. Security remains deployed throughout Syria, observers say, and…
Continue reading …Fall in funding raises question mark over future of global fight against Aids
August 19, 2011 No Comment
International financing for HIV programmes in developing nations worldwide has fallen 10% according to a new report Get the data International funding for Aids programmes in developing countries across the world dropped by 10% in 2010, according to a new report, raising concern that funding for the global fight against HIV and Aids may be on a long-term downward trend. Figures show that funding from 15 of the world’s largest donors dropped in 2010 for the first time in a decade. An annual funding analysis by UNAids and the Kaiser Family Foundation, released this week, shows donors gave $6.9bn in 2010 for HIV prevention, care, treatment and support – down $740m from 2009. The decrease comes when innovative methods to stop the spread of HIV are emerging. Earlier this year, for example, groundbreaking studies in Botswana, Kenya, and Uganda , found that partners of people living with HIV can protect themselves from infection by taking a once-daily pill. At the UN high-level meeting on Aids in June, donors committed to put another 9 million people on treatment by 2015, raising the total number of those receiving HIV treatment to 15 million. But mobilising the resources needed to take advantage of new treatments, and raising funds to meet the “15 by 15″ goal, now looks more challenging than at any time in the past 10 years. This week’s study shows funding for HIV and Aids programmes in low- and middle-income countries increased more than six-fold between 2002 and 2008, before levelling off in 2009 and dropping in 2010. Much of this change is attributed to the impact of the global financial crisis on government budgets. Of the 15 donors surveyed by the report, seven had rolled back their funding for HIV and Aids programmes in 2010. Some of the overall drop is due to fluctuations in countries’ exchange rates. But the fall is largely driven by a reduction in disbursements from the US: “as the single largest donor, the US delay affected the overall financial picture for the year,” said the report. While Washington appropriated about $5.5bn for Aids in both 2009 and 2010, disbursements dropped from $4.4bn in 2009 to $3.7bn in 2010. Figures are not yet available for 2011. Despite the drop in funding, Bernhard Schwartlander, director of evidence, strategy and results for UNAids, insists: “We haven’t seen a decrease in access to services. More people have received treatment than ever before.” “Even though we have seen – for the first time – a significant decrease in funding from international donors, we have also seen programmes become more efficient,” explains Schwartlander. “But could we have done more if we had more resources? That, of course, is a very different question.” A key issue is whether the decrease in funding in 2010 is a one-off drop or the beginning of a new trend. If donor contributions to the fight against HIV and Aids continue to shrink, “it will be impossible to get where we need to go,” says Schwartlander. “The drop in funding may be a temporary blip,” says Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of global health policy and HIV for the Kaiser Family Foundation. “However, given the budget battles in Washington – and the fact that the US provides the majority of donor government funding for the Aids response – the future of Aids financing remains unclear.” UNAids estimates that at least $22bn will be needed by 2015 to reach the millennium development goal targets to ensure universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support. This level of funding could prevent more than 12 million new HIV infections and avert more than 7 million deaths, says this week’s study. At June’s UN meeting, commitments were reaffirmed to raise funding for the global Aids response to $22-24bn by 2015. Some key points from this week’s report: • Of the 15 governments surveyed for the study, donations from seven – Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the US – dropped in 2010. • While $8.7bn was committed towards the global fight against HIV and Aids in 2010, only $6.9bn was actually disbursed. • In 2010, despite the slowdown in disbursements from Washington, the US was still the largest donor, accounting for more than half (54.2%) of Aids funding. • But, taking into account the different sizes of government economies, the US ranks seventh in Aids funding as a share of GDP. Denmark ranks first, followed by the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway. • Overall, funding increased more than sixfold between 2002 and 2008, before levelling off in 2009 and dropping in 2010. The biggest year-on-year jump in funding was between 2007 and 2008, when flows rose from $4.9bn to $7.7bn. Note that the data in the report focuses on funding for the delivery of HIV-related services – from prevention and care to treatment and support – and doesn’t include funding for international HIV research carried out in donor countries. And just because overall funding has dropped doesn’t mean that all Aids programs have suffered a shrink in resources. Different programmes may attract different levels of funding. In November, UNAids is expected to release a more detailed analysis of financing for the global Aids response, looking in part at the support received by different types of programmes. Here we’re highlighting the data from this week’s report. We’ve also looked at previous funding analyses, extracting figures on countries’ past commitments and disbursements. What can you do with the data? Data summary Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world’s government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world’s global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook Development data Aids and HIV Health Claire Provost guardian.co.uk
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Continue reading …European stock markets opened markedly lower today over continued misgivings about the situation in the US and Europe, the New York Times reports. Germany’s main index fell 3.9% this morning, while France’s fell 3.4%—on the heels of yesterday’s 5% drop; Britain’s benchmark index was down 2.8%….
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John Michael McDonagh’s debut sees Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle partner up in an odd couple cop movie that arrests the genre’s slump, says Henry Barnes Henry Barnes
Continue reading …Google Maps has got a treat for weather nerds: The service has added a “weather layer” showing weather conditions and cloud cover around the world, using data provided by he Weather Channel’s weather.com and the US Naval Research Laboratory, reports PC World . “To add the weather layer, hover over…
Continue reading …Last year saw deaths from terrorism drop for the third year in a row, although the number of terror attacks was up slightly, according to the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism . Some 13,186 people were killed in 11,500 terror attacks in 72 countries, down from 22,…
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