I and whoever else reads about India from various angles of its economy and from diverse news sources, will have noted that corruption more than ever, takes up and accounts for a sizeable size of the country’s economic activity at an increasingly unmanageable cost. This has accelerated in the recent past.
That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s bad for obvious reasons: all levels are indulging in it and no section of public or private life is free from it. It is specially bad in this uncertain global economy given the news that foreign investors are becoming increasing skittish with the all-pervasive corruption. Right now there’s a flood flight of foreign direct investment as a kind of intervention that external money is asking for. That’s not a good thing with the circumstances seen in the neighbourhood - the bankruptcy of Sri Lanka and the imminent economic failure of Pakistan and several other economically weak Asian countries. What’s the good part of all this then? The sooner corruption accelerates and peaks, the sooner the resistance to it can and will come, bringing along with it a coarse broom that will sweep up this mountain of trash that has been choking the heartbeat and clogging the arterial pathways that lead to India’ success. The success that it has long deserved but found interrupted ever since the current government took over in 2014, sustaining itself with meaningless actions, monumental blunders, hollow rhetoric, blind popularity and nothing else. This blind popularity I talk about is what allowed the Rajapakshas in Sri Lanka to destroy their country. There is only so much that whipping up religious fervour and hatred can do. Soon it will be time to face the boardroom in the form of angry shareholders rushing in with pointed stakes to punish someone for the pilot having to yell “Mayday, Mayday”. Perhaps the peak may not come as soon as I am expecting it. Maybe it will take more years, but when it does, it will have to be an even bigger upheaval for it to cause the constantly increasing weight of accumulated garbage to be swept away. Roland. Toronto.
