The British Govt. has ordered an inquiry into corruption in Sarva Siksha Abhiyan which financially is supported by it. This has been triggered by a report of our Comptroller and Auditor General that Rs 10 lakhs were spent under the project for the purchase of four luxury beds. Rs 90 lakhs were transferred into an unknown bank account. 7,500 colour TV sets were purchased for schools that did not even have electricity connections. Worse, foreign aid also changes the direction of our own govt. expenditures.
In an earlier World Development Report, the World Bank has elaborated many ways in which aid is having a negative impact on the recipient countries.
*Aid influences the nature of domestic spending. The donor may give aid for only capital expenses and expect the recipient to incur running expenditures from its own budget. A donor may make a huge hospital for AIDS, which is high or its own agenda, and that may lead to the poor country spending towards the recurring expenditures in AIDS prevention. The recipient country then spends less money on the prevention of TB or malnutrition which is more important and spends more on AIDS prevention.
*Donors may insist that the recipient govt. spend their own money in specified sectors as conditionality for receiving aid. The IMF, for example, has insisted that the poor countries seeking debt relief have to open up their economies and follows an ‘open borders’ policy. That opens up those countries for the Western exports and multinational corporations. Aid then becomes a tool of arm-twisting reluctant nationalist or swadeshi governments to fall in line.
Big salaries
*Foreign donors often provide big salaries to their domestic employees. A salary of Rs 50,000 per month or consultancy charges of Rs 5,000 per day is ‘normal’ for such appointments. The result is that those who may have joined ‘good’ politics are distracted. My friend was the state-level secretary of a Left party. He got disillusioned by the internal politics of the party. Instead of fighting within the Party, he became a highly-paid representative of a foreign donor. He was distracted from fighting against the bad politics in the party.
*Donors often provide the needed services directly. If a donor builds schools in the villages it takes the pressure off the govt. system to perform. The result is that the govt. system becomes worse. This undermines the line departments of the recipient country in the long run. In Bangladesh many health and education services are being provided by the donor-NGO network. This reduces the accountability of the political system for its responsibility in these matters.
Our govt. continues to beg for more aid from Western countries despite these negative consequences because it is easier to siphon monies out of aided projects. It is more difficult to siphon money from projects supported by domestic tax revenues because more taxes have to be imposed to make up for the leaked amount. This leads to resentment among the taxpayers.
Leaking out money from aided projects does not cause such resentment. Only more aid is to be sought from the donor. Thus, the govt. has embarked upon the strategy of seeking aid and leaking it away.
Root of mischief: It is fruitless to ask the govt. to put its house in order because everyone from the minister to the lowest contract worker is enjoying the fruits of this evil game. We have to hit at the philosophical idea on which this misconduct thrives. The underlying misconception is that people’s welfare can be secured through the govt. machinery. People have been led to believe that it is the govt.’s responsibility to provide them with education, health cure, water, food and housing. The govt. is using this expectation of the people as a smokescreen behind which it is merrily engaging in massive corruption. We will have to break this mindset of the people.
Ministers say that corruption can be checked only if the people demand transparency. True. But if the society has to organize itself to control corruption by the govt. employees, then, pray, why not organize to provide these services directly? Instead of the village organizing itself for seeking transparency in running of the village government school, why not organize to run a school themselves? We shall be spared of this corruption only when the mythic of welfare state will be broken. (bharatj@sancharnet.in)
