We reported last week that Bihar, of all states Bihar, was the least corrupt state in India today. [You can read the report here: Bihar wins yet another battle, is now ‘least corrupt state’] A large number of readers have reacted to the report, with a whole range of reactions including one that had a word not worth publishing. Some were pleasantly surprised, some thought it was bound to happen with Nitish Kumar at the helm, some said if Bihar of all places is the best, what can we hope for the rest of India.

And many questioned the methodology. Who did the ‘survey’ and how? So, here is the clarification, the fine print. Taking the story further, as it were.

Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari, eminent and respected economic commentators, have come out with a book, ‘Corruption in India: The DNA and the RNA’ (Konark Publishers). Among several other things, they have also compared states when it comes to battling corruption – the most talked about issue in India today [Guess what's the most talked about issue in India].

Here, they start with The National Crime Record Bureau’s ‘Crime in India’ database, which has sections on cognizable crimes registered and disposed under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA) and the relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Of course, not all kinds of corruption would show up in police records – some graft cases are handled through departmental inquiries, some are never reported or complained about. In any case, in 2009, 3,683 corruption-related crime cases were recorded in the country. If you add the backlog of the previous years, there were a total of 9,580 cases.

The authors have analysed these data in detail. If we skip a few paragraphs and come down to a comparison of states, here is the relevant portion from the book:

“The state-level variations are brought out with the help of an index constructed using data from 4 five-year periods – 1990-95, 1996-2000, 2001-2005, and 2006-10. Annual data were first aggregated for each of these periods and the following ratios were created:
number of persons arrested out of every 1,000 government employees,
cases charge sheeted as a share of total cases investigated,
cases sent for trial or departmental action as a share of total cases charge sheeted,
proportion of cases that resulted in recoveries out of total cases investigated
proportion of cases that resulted in convictions as a share of trials,
and proportion of persons who were finally charge-sheeted as a share of those in custody or bail.
These six ratios were normalised using the standard maxmin approach and then aggregated with equal weights.”

The result of this exercise is presented in the tabulated form (attached below as PDF), which shows Bihar at the top. In fact, Bihar’s ‘rating’ more than doubled during 2006-10, and it was during this period that Bihar overtook Gujarat.

Did something happen in Bihar in 2006?

Read more about Nitish’s latest anti-graft salvo: Administrative reforms: Nitish rings in September revolution

Meanwhile, as for readers from other states, you can check where your state stands in the ‘rating’ table. For those who can’t be bothered to open the attachment:

“In the last few years, Bihar and Gujarat score much above the other states in recent times (sic). Andhra Pradesh had done a much better job in the late nineties.  Haryana was better in the past; Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh have been improving albeit slowly; Uttar Pradesh rated low in the past but has been improving. West Bengal on the other hand performed poorly in the past and has since worsened through the 1990s and 2000s ranking lower than all other major states of the country. But Kerala has been improving slowly. Maharashtra was among the topmost states in the first half of the 1990s but has since fallen dramatically. Punjab stagnated till the second half of the 2000s but has since been improving. Orissa is a state that has had a fairly stable government, however it does not show that much of an improvement over time.”

WHAT NITISH HAS DONE TO FIGHT CORRUPTION

The Bihar government has introduced a number of initiatives to check corruption. Here are some of them:

*  Bihar Special Courts Act, 2010: Under this act the government can confiscate property of bureaucrats accused of bribery and convert them in to schools. Acting under this law the Bihar government on September 4 seized the property of suspended IAS officer Shiv Shankar Verma. The 1981-batch IAS officer, a secretary in the minor irrigation department, was facing investigations into assets disproportionate to his sources of income. The house is likely to be turned into a school. The state government is close to completing the formalities for handing over the property to the human resource department and the cabinet is expected to clear the proposal soon.

*  Declaration of asset: It has been made mandatory for the CM, his ministerial colleagues, bureaucrats and officials, down to Class III government employees, to declare their assets.

*  Uploading video clips of bribe-takers on You Tube: The government has decided to expose officials seeking bribes in welfare schemes by uploading clips of complaints against them on the video-sharing website YouTube. To begin with, officials seeking bribes from the poorest of the poor for the Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) will be targeted

*  Rs 5 lakh to whistleblower:  The  government has also decided to give whistle-blowers a Rs 5 lakh incentive for exposing graft in development projects.
The amount will be given to anyone who tips off the vigilance bureau about the 'loot' of public money meant for welfare projects. But the cash award will be given only after the accused is convicted and substantial government funds are saved.

*  Right to public services act: The act guarantees delivery of services within a stipulated time limit. Under the act 50 services including issuing of driving license, caste, domicile, income, marriage certificates, from ten departments have been notified.