Does the BJP have anything to do with the decline of corruption?

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been spearheading a slew of measures to fight black money and corruption. It has, in fact, become the go-to pitch for any political party contesting elections. The latest India Corruption Study (ICS) conducted by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), show signs of a decline in corruption in public services as gauged by popular perception and experience of people from 20 states. With the BJP government close to completing three years in power, the survey reinforces the government’s claims that corruption levels have been on a decline since the government introduced anti-corruption measures. But do the numbers really reflect the work of the government in power?

The study focuses on petty corruption that people face on a daily basis while availing public services. It is a comparison of the levels of corruption in 2005 with that of 2016- given that the referral period is the past 12 months and not the entire period of 12 years. Hence, the findings are based on response from 3,000 households in over 200 rural and urban regions from 20 states between October and November 2016 and January 2017.

“If corruption goes up, it is news but corruption going down is never news,” said N Bhaskara Rao, founder chairman of Centre for Media Studies (CMS) at the release of the 11th CMS-India Corruption Study (ICS) 2017 on Thursday. The study’s claim that the three south Indian states which are the most corrupt- Karnataka (77 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (74 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (68 per cent)- none of which have a BJP government in power are another reason for BJP to rejoice.

Though compared to 2005, the absolute numbers seem to have gone down in 2016 and early 2017, the reasons for corruption still remain the same. “Among the reasons cited for paying bribe, noticeable is the fact that main reasons continue to be similar in most of the public services over the last 10 years,” reads the report.

“Ratings and rankings are misleading because corruption remains and reasons remain the same,” said Rao while speaking to the reporters. For instance, he said that the “delay and defer” tactics still remained as the report suggests that certain services could not be availed without payment of a bribe.

We asked the director of the survey, Alok Srivastava, whether the changing governments had anything to do with the numbers, he denied it and said that the reasons for asking and receiving bribes had remained unchanged since 2005. He said that people working in the various public service departments were still the same, hence corruption remained.

However, Bibek Debroy, member of NITI Ayog, who released the report said that he is already awaiting next year’s corruption report suggesting that the anti-corruption measures taken by the government would begin to show. “I’ll be even more interested in next years CMS because there are several initiatives that have recently been taken which should affect corruption in some of its forms,” he said while speaking to reporters. “Whether it is the real estate act which is prone to corruption, whether it is the clamping down cash transactions, there is a whole long list. So I’ll be even more interested to see in next year’s report to see what happens,” he said.

One of the measures that Debroy was speaking of was demonetisation. But the study was conducted between October and November 2016, a period before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “surgical strike” on corruption and black money. However, CMS conducted telephonic surveys with a “randomly selected sub-sample of households” in the 20 states to assess the impact of demonetisation in January 2017. The result suggests that most of the respondents felt that corruption levels had decreased during this period. It was not entirely clear if this could be attributed to the scarcity of cash at the time.

Speaking to Newslaundry, BJP spokesperson GVL Narsimha Rao said that corruption had disappeared after the BJP government took charge in 2014. “After a period of rampant and limitless corruption in higher echelons of governance during the UPA era, Shri Narendra Modi as Prime Minister has brought integrity and transparency into governance,” he told Newslaundry. “His clean and efficient governance has had a wide ranging impact on nation’s consciousness. Corruption today is no longer a subject of public discourse and has disappeared from the media space as well,” he added.

According to the study, Himachal Pradesh (3 per cent), Kerala (4 per cent) and Chhattisgarh (13 per cent) are the states where people experienced the least corruption in 2016. The public perception and experience of the most amount of corruption was seen to be in police services (34 per cent), land/housing (24 per cent) and judicial services (18 per cent).

The study also focused on perception of the current government. About 40 per cent of the respondents felt that the Modi government was “committed towards reducing corruption in public services”, however, 40 per cent respondents also felt that this commitment was only “to some extent”. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that no other government has passed as many anti-corruption legislations as his party had. “I cannot comment on the technique of this poll but I can say with certainty that no government has passed as many anti-corruption legislations as UPA-1 and UPA-2 did, including the Foreign Agents Bribery Act, Whistleblowers Act, Lokpal Act and many other,” he told Newslaundry. “The record of the NDA has been abysmal compared to us, so I must say that they are much better at tom-toming their non-existent achievements,” he added.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @shrutimenon10.