One third of the people living Below Poverty Line (BPL) in India pay bribes to access healthcare, education, water and other basic facilities, according to a study which also dubs the police force as the most corrupt among the services surveyed.
The joint study by the Transparency International India and the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), found that one-third of the BPL households paid Rs 9,000 million as bribes in 2007 for availing one of the 11 public services covered in the survey. The services covered in the survey are Public Distribution System (PDS), hospital service, senior secondary school education, electricity and water supply. Need-based services like National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, land records and registration, forest, housing, banking and police service were also covered. *Police most corrupt * The 'TII-CMS India Corruption Study 2007' revealed that police tops the chart, as far as corruption in 11 selected public services is concerned. Of the 5.6 million BPL households that interacted with the police last year, a whopping 2.5 million paid Rs 2,150 million as bribe for some or the other work. Land records and registration services comes second in terms of monetary contribution as nearly 3.5 million BPL households paid Rs 1,224 million as bribe. A total of 22,728 BPL households were surveyed across the states throughout the country, adopting the Perception, Experience and Estimation (PEE) model. The TII-CMS study also revealed that the PDS service was not readily available as 5.36 million BPL families had to pay bribe or use a contact to avail the services. The survey found that the situation at government hospitals was very disappointing as almost 4 million BPL households had to bribe hospital staff to get their works done. The total amount of bribe paid to the hospital staff/official by poor in the last year was estimated to be Rs 870 million. The survey further revealed that in order to get electricity connection or to get faulty meter rectified, people have to bribe officials/staff of the electricity department. It was also found that amount paid as bribe by the BPL households for availing school services was Rs 120 million. http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Jun292008/national2008062976010.asp ----------------------------- I blog at: http://legalterror.wordpress.com/ http://society.indianskeptic.com/ Keep Fighting 498A Keep Fighting Legal Terrorism Keep Fighting Inequality in Justice http://www.pollsb.com/webdigr If "con" is the opposite of "pro", then what is the opposite of progress? [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
